
Qass. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY 



OF 



CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 



BY 
FREDERICK WILLIAM ROE 

IV 

JUNIOR DEAN AND ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, 
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN 




a 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
1921 



^ / 



6^ 



COPYRIGHT, I92I, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 



MiG 26 1^^- 



g)C!.A622534 



ll^ 



TO MY WIFE 
LUCY LEWIS ROE "^ 4 



FOREWORD 

The following chapters have been written not only 
as an interpretation on important sides of two great 
and related literary personalities of the Victorian Era, 
but also as a contribution, however slight, to the 
history of social thought in England during a critical 
period. The writer would fain hope that the chal- 
lenging message of these prophets, delivered in a time 
of profound transformations in the structure of 
society, might not be without inspiration and guid- 
ance for our own day, a day even more disturbed than 
theirs, more fraught with unrest and uncertainty, 
when men everywhere are listening for authentic 
voices that shall speak counsels worthy to be fol- 
lowed. For the social philosophy of Carlyle and 
Ruskin is not a matter of academic interest for a few 
leisured scholars and book-lovers alone. It is rather a 
trumpet-call to workers, old and young, workers alike 
with hand and with brain, — to put forth their utmost 
efforts, in the midst of the present confusion, for the 
purpose of effecting an ordered revolution of our 
industrial system, so that civilization in reality may 
become what for generations at least it has not 
been, — "the humanization of man in society.** 

The text of Carlyle used throughout the volume is 
the text of the Copyright Edition^ published in Eng- 
land by Chapman and Hall, and sold in America by 
Scribner*s. The text of Ruskin is that of the Library 



vi FOREWORD 

Edition^ edited by Cook and Wedderburn, and pub- 
lished by Longmans, Green* & Co. 

For much helpful criticism, the author wishes to 
record here his thanks to his long-time friend and 
college classmate. Dr. John Gowdy, President of the 
Anglo-Chinese College, Foochow, China. 

F. W. R. 

Madison, Wisconsin, 
December, 1920, 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword ] v 

The New Age i 

Sansculottism and Its Prophet 41 

The New Chivalry of Labor 86 

Master and Disciple 128 

\Xhe Apostle of Art and the Modem World 149 

<rhe Art Impulse in Industry and the New Political 

Economy 179 

The Sword of St. George 204 

"^ Heralds of the Better Order 289 

Appendix 325 

Index 331 



vn 



SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF 
CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

CHAPTER I 

THE NEW AGE 

"On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his 
workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. 
The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls 
into iron fingers that ply it faster. . . . Coal and iron, so 
long unregardful neighbors, are wedded together; Birming- 
ham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, 
with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, 
rose into day." — Carlyle. 

No discussion of the social philosophy of Carlyle 
and Ruskin can be understood without some ac- 
count, however brief and incomplete, of the trans- 
formation in modern life known as the industrial 
revolution. The message of these great Victorians to 
their contemporaries, their denunciations of present 
evils as well as their prophetic vision of a better order, 
were set forth against a background of social change 
that took shape before their eyes. And they were not 
only witnesses of this mighty drama of contending 
industrial forces; they could also well remember 
times, in their youth or early manhood, when the 
English landscape was yet unsullied by factory- 
smoke, and when many an English cottager lived 



2 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

amidst beauty and peace and contentment and had 
not yet been infected by the fever of a modern manu- 
facturing town. An account of these movements, 
therefore, even though it is more than a twice-told 
tale, must be placed before the reader, as an indis- 
pensable setting to the social philosophy which he is 
invited to consider. But it is a story fascinating in 
itself, fairly epical in its sweep and consequence, and 
one which the student of latter-day problems cannot 
know too well. The stream of events upon which it is 
borne along, moreover, flows onward from the begin- 
ning more unbrokenly in England than in any other 
country; for here all the older conditions existed in 
their fulness, and here the newer life first came into 
being in its power. 

The man of to-day cannot easily picture that older 
world in which his ancestors lived less than two 
centuries ago. Measured as history measures them, 
changes have been so recent and so revolutionary 
that the England of the first Georges seems less 
removed from the times of the Pharaohs than from 
the England of the present, at least in nearly every- 
thing that is concerned with the daily activities of 
man. Commerce, manufacture, agriculture, travel, 
domestic economy, one and all, were carried on very 
much as they had been carried on centuries before. 
The world was bigger, cities were larger and more 
numerous, and the fruits of civilization were vastly 
more distributed, it is true, in the eighteenth century 
than in any previous age; and with these changes 
there were corresponding changes also in the external 
fashions and habits of life. But the business of the 



THE NEW AGE 3 

home, the field, and the market-place was not essen- 
tially different from what it had been when the 
heedful Penelope sat in her hall at Ithaca weaving 
the great web, or when Jacob drove shrewd bargains 
with his uncle Laban on the plains of Padan-Aram. 
In 1760 — to take a convenient date — the old com- 
munal system of agriculture in England was in full 
swing. Land around a manor, or lord's house, was 
broken up into innumerable small strips, cultivated, 
fallow, and waste. The yeoman farmers of those 
days, some of them tenants, some of them free- 
holders (of whom there were about 180,000) tilled 
their scattered allotments, pastured their cattle, 
sheep, and swine on a common pasture, and lived in 
small clustered cottages. Most of their implements 
were wooden and therefore inadequate, and their 
methods of farming were almost hopelessly anti- 
quated; for they did not rotate their crops nor 
fertilize, and they systematically allowed one-third of 
their arable land to lie fallow each year. Intervening 
between one community and another, moreover, 
there were likely to be immense tracts of undrained 
fen, waste moorland, or forest, which the enterprise 
or necessity of man had not yet reclaimed from their 
primeval state. Thus in these rural centers, lapped 
in a surrounding stillness of which we to-day can 
scarcely dream, these sturdy peasant proprietors 
lived from generation to generation, remote and slow 
no doubt, but, from all accounts not like Goldsmith's 
villagers, for they were neither unfriended nor melan- 
choly. England in their times was an agricultural 
nation. Her lawmakers were her landlords and much 



4 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

of her physical and moral strength was in her yeo- 
men. 

The fields were not alone the source of livelihood. 
Otherwise these agricultural communities could not 
have been self-sufficient. Every farmer's cottage was 
his factory, where the family, old and young, not 
only made their own candles and leather, but spun 
and wove their own cloth from the wool of their own 
sheep. At least this was the custom in the beginning 
and for most peasants, although in some parts ot 
England from Tudor times onward it was expanded 
into what has since been known as the "domestic 
system" of manufacture. "Every family spun from 
its own flock the wool with which it was clothed," 
says Wordsworth, speaking of the dalesmen of West- 
moreland; "a weaver was here and there found 
among them; and the rest of their wants was supplied 
by the produce of the yarn, which they carded and 
spun in their own houses and carried to market, 
either under their arms, or more frequently on pack- 
horses, a small train taking their way weekly down 
the valley or over the mountains to the most com- 
modious towns." ^ It was the existence of these 
"commodious" towns, which were not self-sufficient, 
as were the earlier rural communities, that had 
brought about a development in "domestic" manu- 
facture, only suggested in the passage just quoted 
from Wordsworth. Since the townspeople did not 
make their own cloth, they purchased it from the 
farmers, who therefore found it more and more to 
their profit to devote a larger share of their time to 

1 Guide to the Lakes, 60. 



THE NEW AGE 5 

spinning and weaving than to farming, at least so 
long as farming went on in the old way. Spinning 
and weaving, moreover, might go on at any season 
and would furnish employment for the entire family 
instead of for a part only. "A family of four adult 
persons, with two children as winders,** said Dr. 
Gaskell, in a book published in 1833, "earned at the 
end of the last and at the commencement of the 
present century, 4/. per week, when working ten 
hours per day."^ 

Thus there grew up entire communities of rural 
cloth-makers, some of them, like those of Yorkshire, 
where woollens were made, dating back to the 
days of the Tudors; others, like those of Lancashire, 
the home of cotton manufacture, probably not ex- 
tending much back of the eighteenth century. In 
the prosperous expansion of this industry, we can 
trace the beginnings of capitalistic enterprise and 
division of labor. A hand-loom weaver would be- 
come the owner of four or five looms, which he 
worked with the assistance of journeymen and 
apprentices. His yarn would be spun in the neigh- 
boring cottages, whose families would thus be depend- 
ent upon him for their employment. If the master 
weaver were a maker of cotton cloth he would take 
the product of his looms thrice a week to the market 
at Manchester, offering his goods for sale, soliciting 
orders, and returning with a quantity of raw mate- 
rial for his spinners. "There was not a village 
within thirty miles of Manchester, on the Cheshire 
and Derbyshire side," says Chapman, in his History 

^ Manufacturing Population of England, 34. 



6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

of the Cotton Manufacture^ "in which cotton manu- 
facturing was not being carried on." ^ Defoe, in his 
Tour of Great Britain (\'jTf)^ has left us a vivid 
picture of these vanished communities of workers, 
in his description of the woollen industry in the 
parish of Halifax, Yorkshire, and of the great cloth- 
market at Leeds, where the weavers marketed their 
goods. "The nearer we came to Halifax," he says, 
"we found the houses thicker, and the villages 
greater, in every bottom; and not only so, but the 
sides of the hill, which were very steep every way, 
were spread with houses; for the land being divided 
into small enclosures, from two acres to six or seven 
each, seldom more, every three or four pieces of land 
had an house belonging to them. In short, after we 
had mounted the third hill, we found the country 
one continued village, though every way mountain- 
ous, hardly an house standing out of a speaking- 
distance from another; and as the day cleared up, 
we could see at every house a tenter, and on alniost 
every tenter a piece of cloth. Kersey, or shalloon; 
which are the three articles of this country *s labor. 
. . . Then, as every clothier (/. ^., weaver) must 
necessarily keep one horse, at least, to fetch home 
his wool and his provisions from the market, to 
carry his yarn to the spinners, his manufacture to 
the fulling-mill, and, when finished, to the market 
to be sold, and the like; so every one generally keeps 
a cow or two for his family. . . . Though we met 
few people without doors, yet within we saw the 
houses full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, 

^Manufacturing Population of England, 37. 



THE NEW AGE 7 

some at the loom, others dressing the cloths; the 
women and children carding, or spinning; all em- 
ployed from the youngest to the oldest; scarce any- 
thing above four years old, but its hands were suffi- 
cient for its own support. Not a beggar to be seen, 
nor an idle person, except here and there in an alms- 
house, built for those that are antient, and past work- 
ing. The people in general live long; they enjoy a 
good air; and under such circumstances hard labour 
is naturally attended with the blessing of health, 
if not riches." 

"The cloth-market held in cloth-hall at Leeds," 
continues Defoe, "is chiefly to be admired, as a 
prodigy of its kind, and perhaps not to be equalled 
in the world. The market for. serges at Exeter is 
indeed a wonderful thing, and the money returned 
very great; but it is there only once a week, whereas 
here it is every Tuesday and Saturday. The Cloth- 
iers (/. e.^ weavers) come early in the morning with 
their cloth; and, as few bring more than one piece, 
the market-days being so frequent, they go into 
the inns and public-houses with it, and there set it 
down. At about six o*clock in the summer, and 
about seven in the winter, the clothiers being all 
come by that time, the market bell at the old 
chapel by the bridge rings; upon which it would sur- 
prise a stranger, to see in how few minutes, without 
hurry, noise, or the least disorder, the whole market 
is filled, all the benches covered with cloth, as close 
to one another as the pieces can lie longways, each 
proprietor standing behind his own piece, who form 
a mercantile regiment, as it were, drawn up in a 



8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

double line; in as great order as a military one. As 
soon as the bell has ceased ringing, the factors and 
buyers of all sorts enter the hall, and walk up and 
down between the rows, as their occasions direct. 
Most of them have papers with patterns sealed on 
them, in their hands; the colours of which they watch, 
by holding them to the cloths they think they agree 
to. When they have pitched upon their cloth, they 
lean over to the clothier, and, by a whisper, in the 
fewest words imaginable, the price is stated; one 
asks, the other bids, and they agree or disagree in a 
moment. . . . The buyers generally walk up and 
down twice on each side of the rows, and in little 
more than half an hour all the business is done. In 
less than half an hour you will perceive the cloth 
begin to move off, the clothier taking it upon his 
shoulder to carry to the merchant's house. At about 
half an hour after eight the market bell rings again, 
upon which the buyers immediately disappear, and 
the cloth which remains unsold is carried back to the 
inn. Thus you see lo or 20,000/. worth of cloth, 
and sometimes much more, bought and sold in little 
more than an hour, the laws of the market being 
the most strictly observed that I ever saw in any 
market in England." ^ 

Other accounts of these "golden times of manu- 
facture," as Dr. Gaskell called them, it would be 
possible to give from various extant sources. For 
example, one of Ruskin's correspondents in the days 
of Fors Clavigera pictures the idyllic past that he 
knew at Wakefield before the advent of machinery 

1 Defoe, Tour oj Great Britain, III, 155-6 and 13 1-2. 



THE NEW AGE 9 

and the factory-system; and his picture sharply 
contrasts the brightness of the old times with the 
blackness of the new. "There was no railway then/' 
he saySj "only the Doncaster coach careering over 
the Bridge with a brave sound of horn; fields and 
farmsteads stood where the Kirkgate station is; 
where the twenty black throats of the foundry belch 
out flame and soot, there were only strawberry 
grounds and blossoming pear-orchards, among which 
the throstles and blackbirds were shouting for glad- 
ness. ... On the chapel side there was the soft 
green English landscape, with woods and spires and 
halls, and the brown sails of boats silently moving 
among the flowery banks; on the town side there 
were picturesque traffic and life; the thundering 
weir, the wide still water beyond, the big dark-red 
granaries, with balconies and archways to the water, 
and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering 
music. But there were no worse shapes than honest, 
dusty millers' men, and browned boatmen, decent 
people. I can remember how clean the pavement 
used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns 
are incredibly dirty now. . . . Market day used 
to be a great event for us all. I wish that you could 
have seen the handsome farmers' wives ranged 
round the church walls, with their baskets of apricots 
and cream cheese, before reform came. . . . You 
might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers' daughters, 
with their bunches of lavender and baskets of fruit, 
or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine and 
vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves 
upon. On certain days they stood to be hired as 



lo CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

maid-servants, and were prized in the country round 
as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls. I do not know 
where they are gone now, — I suppose to the facto- 
ries. . . . Tradespeople were different, too, in old 
Wakefield. They expected to live with us all their 
lives; they had high notions of honor as tradesmen, 
and they and their customers respected each other. 
They prided themselves on the 'wear' of their goods. 
If they had passed upon the housewives a piece of 
sized calico or shoddy flannel, they would have 
heard of it for years after. Now the richer ladies 
go to Leeds or Manchester to make purchases; the 
town tradesmen are soured and jealous. They put 
up big plate-glass fronts, and send out flaming bills; 
but one does not know where to get a piece of sound 
calico or stout linen, well spun and well woven." ^ 

The more characteristic aspects of this attractive 
picture were no doubt reproduced in hundreds of 
towns all over the country. England had a foreign 
trade then, as she had had in the days of Chaucer, 
but commerce and manufacturing in the modern 
sense were unknown. Her people lived and worked 
under the old, old theory that each community was to 
be self-sustaining. Relations therefore were far less 
international than national, and even more parochial 
than national. Villages and towns lived largely unto 
themselves, shut out from the rest of the world, most 
of their inhabitants never seeing beyond the horizon 
that circled their ancestral homes. For in those days 
there were few roads, and those few were almost 
hopelessly bad. According to Adam Smith, it took 

1 Ruskin, Works, XXVIII, 380-2. 



THE NEW AGE ii 

a broad-wheeled wagon, attended by two men and 
drawn by eight horses, about six weeks to carry and 
bring back between London and Edinburgh four tons 
weight of goods. ^ It took a coach longer to go the 
same distance than it now takes a liner to go from 
Liverpool to New York. In the summer season a 
journey by coach from London to Manchester occu- 
pied two days. Travel, therefore, was infrequent and 
only for the well-to-do. Traders went from com- 
munity to community on horseback, or afoot, and 
bartered their goods on market days or at periodical 
fairs, as did the voluble Bob Jakin in Mill on the 
Floss, The beginnings of capitalistic enterprise at this 
period there were, as we have seen, but the captain 
of industry who systematically exploited his labor, 
purchasing it in the cheapest market, and who de- 
veloped his industry in the British spirit of individ- 
ualism had not yet come. Nor had the wage-earner, 
nor the factory-system. It was not an ideal world, 
far from it; and there were communities, such as the 
weavers of coarse cloth at Oldham, Lancashire, 
among whom conditions were wretched. But take it 
all in all, the world of those days was a world of con- 
tented toilers, for the most part independent and 
prosperous, owning their own wheels and looms, and 
on Sundays regularly attending the village church, 
because like Job "they feared God, and eschewed 
evil;" — a world, be it said, which furnished the quiet 
background in so much of Wordsworth's poetry and 
to v^rhich Carlyle and Ruskin and Morris reverted so 
often a half century and more afterward. 

1 Wealth of Nations, I, 20. 



12 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Then as if by magic came the flying shuttle, the 
spinning-jenny, and the power-loom, followed rapidly 
by the application of steam to all the uses of industry 
through new and marvelous machinery. Then came 
also a revolution in travel and transportation by 
means of canals, Macadam*s turnpikes, railroads, 
and steamships. By a kind of simultaneous collabo- 
ration of wonder-working forces, a new world sprang 
into being, and the old world vanished like ghost at 
cock-crow.^ "The spinning-wheel and the hand-loom 
were silenced, and manufactures were transferred 
from scattered villages and quiet homesteads to 
factories and cities filled with noise. Villages became 
towns, towns became cities, and factories started up 
on barren heath and deserted waste." Within fifty 
years English industry changed from medieval or 
semi-medieval to modern conditions. A new order of 
population was created. Commerce and manu- 
facture went forward by leaps and bounds. And by 
the middle of the nineteenth century England became 
the wealthiest nation in the world, and her people 
found themselves in the midst of a gigantic industrial 



^ It is interesting to note the close sequence of dates respecting the 
principal inventions and improvements: the fly-shuttle by John Kay, 
1733; the spinning-jenny by Hargraves, 1764; the water-frame by 
Arkwright, 1769; the "mule" by Crompton, 1779; Watt's steam-engine, 
first used to run spinning machines, 1785; Cartwright's power-loom, 
1785; smelting iron by coal, 17401750; application of steam to blast 
furnaces, 1788; Davy's safety lamp, 1815; Duke of Bridgewater's canal, 
1759; improvement of roads and bridge-building under Telford and 
Macadam, 1815-1830; first railroad, Stockton to Darlington, 1825; 
Fulton's Clermont, from New York to Albany, 1807; the Comet, first 
passenger steamer in Europe, launched on Clyde, 1812; Great Western, 
built by Cunard Company, the first steamship to cross the Atlantic, 
1838. 



THE NEW AGE 13 

system, with its myriad interests and its multitudi- 
nous problems. 

A few figures may assist the reader's imagination to 
grasp the magnitude of these changes. The popula- 
tion of England and Wales in 1750 is estimated to 
have been 6,517,035; by 1821 it had nearly doubled. 
The increase in the population of England and Wales 
from 1770 to 1 801 was 27^^%; from 1801 to 1831 it 
was 56-3/5%.^ The manufacturing towns expanded 
enormously. From 1801 to 1831, the population of 
Glasgow increased 161%, Manchester, 151%, Liver- 
pool, 138%, Birmingham, 90%.^ "The population of 
Lancashire, which is the great center of the cotton 
trade,'' says Dr. Gaskell, "in 1700, was 166,200; in 
1750, 297,400; in 1801, 672,731; in 181 1, 828,309; 
in 1821, 1,052,859; in 1831, 1,335,800."^ In 1700 
the agricultural population was double that of the 
manufacturing population; by 1830 the situation was 
reversed. In 18 13 there were 2,400 power looms in 
use in Great Britain; in 1835 there were 116,801.^ In 
1760 in the cotton trade 3,000,000 pounds of cotton 
were manufactured; in 1833, 303,656,837 pounds 
were produced.^ "One spinner," says Dr. Gaskell, 
writing in 1836, "produces as much in one day now 
as would have required a year's time to produce a 
century ago." ^ In 1787 there were 41 cotton mills in 
Lancashire alone; a half century later, there were 157, 

^ Porter, The Progress of the Nation^ 13. 

2 Gaskell, Manufacturing Population of England, 220. 

^ Ibid., 220. 

^ Chapman, Lancashire Cotton Industry, 28. 

^Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 329. 

^Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 329. 



14 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

with operatives estimated at 1 37,000. ^ Perhaps 
nothing shows more impressively, the effect of the 
new order of things than the growth in the importa- 
tion of raw cotton: in 181 5 it amounted to 82 miUion 
pounds; in 1835 it was 318 million pounds; in 1851,659 
million pounds.^ "The Briarean arms of the steam- 
engine" reached into every industry and "British 
science and British skill" made England, in the popu- 
lar phrase of the Victorian era, the workshop of the 
world. The soldiers of Napoleon who marched to 
Moscow wore clothing made of cloth from English 
looms, and manufactured goods from English factories 
were carried by British merchantmen to the ends of 
the earth. It is little wonder that many a contempo- 
rary writer should hail the new inventions as a special 
dispensation of providence to British genius, and 
should describe the new times in language that sounds 
ludicrously extravagant to-day, even to American 
ears. The transformations wrought upon society 
were indeed more revolutionary, both actually and 
potentially, than any which the world had hitherto 
seen. The new distributions of property, the rapid 
accumulations of private fortunes, the widespread 
application of machinery and the consequent enor- 
mous multiplication of the conveniences and luxuries 
of life, the disappearance of some classes and the 
emergence of others, together with the deeper changes 
in the habits and thoughts of a whole people, — all 
these were circumstances sufficient to awaken the 
attention of thoughtful men to the fact that a new 

1 Podmore, Life of Owen^ I, 40. 

2 Slater, The Making of Modern England^ laS. 



THE NEW AGE 15 

order of life had come into being, bringing with it new 
conditions and new problems such as were destined 
to make rough sailing for the ship of state in the years 
ahead. 

For the source of England's wealth was likewise the 
source of her most troublesome problems and her 
darkest conditions, the factory system. In the early 
days of machinery, before the application of steam to 
manufacturing and when the power-loom was oper- 
ated by the force of water, factories sprang up in the 
country districts wherever a stream afforded suffi- 
cient power to turn the wheels. A little later, as 
soon as it was demonstrated that the power-loom 
could be profitably run by steam, factories were 
transferred to towns, where more workers lived or 
could live and where goods could be marketed more 
readily and more cheaply. It was not long before 
these factory towns presented an appearance with 
which the world of to-day is only too familiar, — myr- 
iads of rickety tenement buildings, housing a vast 
and crowded population of operatives with their 
families, — acres of factories, most of them hastily 
constructed and badly ventilated, and thrusting into 
the sky a forest of chimneys from which there poured 
a never-ceasing cloud of smoke that blackened the 
country for miles around. The population in these 
industrial centers grew rapidly on its own account, 
but it was augmented from two classes outside, the 
rural cloth-workers of the old order who were being 
thrown out of employment because of the introduc- 
tion of new machinery, and the small farmers who 
were forced to leave their farms in consequence of 



i6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the movement in agriculture known as enclosures.* 
How different was this new army of workers from the 
old ! Instead of an independent people, living mostly 
in the country, owning their own cottages and tools, 
and tilling their own small farms or gardens, there 
grew up a vast aggregation of dependent city toilers, 
— men, women, and children, — tenanting rented 
houses, working in factories not their own, and 
operating machinery that required less and less skill 
and more and more merely monotonous "tending." 
The day of the wage-earner had come. The day of 
the exploiting captain of industry had come also. 
Sprung in most cases from the ranks of operatives, 
knowing little or nothing of what went on beyond the 
four walls of his factory, frequently illiterate, usually 
brutal and debased, the typical factory-owner of the 
first quarter or so of the nineteenth century was 
industrious and shrewd enough to accumulate a 

^The old system of farming, described in the previous pages, was 
found to be wasteful and backward in the extreme. In the eighteenth 
century a few progressive landlords, like the Marquis of Rockingham, 
the Duke of Bedford, Lord Townshend, and even George III himself, 
began experimenting in new crops, new methods of rotation, drainage, 
etc. They soon demonstrated the great value of these improvements. 
But it was found that the new farming could not proceed without the 
overthrow of the old. Hence, by act of parliament or by coercive act 
of landlord, there went on from 1760 to 1843 a readjustment known as 
enclosures. The small parcels of disconnected open land and the " com- 
mons" were re-apportioned into larger groups of enclosed lands, held by 
fewer farmers under longer leases, or independently. The movement 
which, considered in its broad aspects, is accurately described by Arthur 
Young as "not merely beneficial to the individual" but "of the most 
extensive national advantage," {J Six Months Tour through the North 
of England, I, 258) was accompanied with great distress to hundreds 
of the small, unprogressive farmers, who were now compelled to become 
either dependent farm-laborers or to join the rising army of the pro- 
letariat in the factory towns. 



THE NEW AGE 17 

fortune rapidly, whereby he could live in newly- 
built mansions furnished with all the tawdry acces- 
sories that money could buy. His position and his 
wealth gave him vast power, often exercised under 
the grossest forms of tyranny over the hordes of 
workers dependent upon him; so that he amply 
deserved the contemptuous nickname with which 
Carlyle dubbed him, — Plugson of Undershot, the 
modern buccaneer.^ 

The condition of the wage-earners operating under 
Plugson and his fellow masters has been the theme of 
novelists, prophets, reformers, and utopia-builders 
the world over. It would be difficult indeed to find 
in the annals of history a more dismal or distressing 
page than the one upon which is written the story of 
the early factory workers. The factories themselves, 
equipped with unprotected machinery and enclosing 
a damp over-heated atmosphere, were in the majority 
of cases wholly unfit for their swarming populations. 
They were of course unsanitary and uninspected, and 
the air in them was filled with floating particles of 
cotton "fluff.** Far the greater number of operatives 
were women and children, since adult male labor was 
not needed to tend the machines. Child-labor was 
not only better adapted to the needs of the work; it 
was cheaper. In the earlier period before the appren- 
tice system was abandoned, pauper children were re- 

1 The attitude of the mill-owner towards his operatives is well sug- 
gested in the remarks of a manufacturer who sold cloth to Francis Place, 
the famous Charing Cross tailor and radical reformer. "Damn their 
eyes," said he to Place, "what need you care about them? How could 
I sell you goods so cheap if I cared anything about them?" "I showed 
him the door," says Place, " and never purchased any of his goods after- 
wards." (Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 141.) 



i8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

cruited from the workhouses and foundling hospitals 
of London and other large cities, and were literally 
sold into slavery to the mill-owners, whose brutal 
overseers were wont to treat them in ways too 
shocking to describe.^ Matters were scarcely im- 
proved when apprentice-children were withheld, or 
when conditions under which they were allowed by 
the magistrates to work were restricted, and "free" 
children were employed; for the reason that parents, 
in their ignorance and poverty, seemed glad enough 
to have the meager wages of the household eked out 
by the pittance which their children might earn. 
Probably the most vivid — one should perhaps say 
lurid — account of these early factory "hands" ever 
written is that by Frederkk Engels, life-long friend 
and co-worker of Karl Marx, in his book called The 
Condition of the Working-Class in England in 18/14. 
Describing child-labor, he refers to the parliament- 
ary Factories' Inquiry Commission of 1833 in these 
words: "The report of the Central Commission re- 
lates that the manufacturers began to employ chil- 
dren rarely of five years, often of six, very often of 
seven, usually of eight to nine years; that the work- 
ing-day often lasted fourteen to sixteen hours, ex- 
clusive of meals and intervals; that the manufacturers 
permitted overlookers to flog and maltreat children, 
and often took an active part in so doing them- 

1 There were exceptions, perhaps the most notable one h^g the case 
of Mr. Dale of New Lanark Mills, on the river Clyde. Mr. Dale (father- 
in-law of Robert Owen, afterwards himself proprietor of New Lanark) 
took over some 500 pauper children, whom he clothed, fed, and lodged, 
and for whom he established a night-school. (Podmore, Lije of Owen, 
I. 73.) 



THE NEW AGE 19 

selves." * As proof of his assertion that the active 
work of the mills was done by women and children, 
Engels quotes figures from a speech of Lord Ashley 
made in support of the Ten Hours* Bill which, Lord 
Ashley introduced into the House of Commons in 
1844: "Of 419,560 factory operatives of the British 
Empire in 1839, 192,887, or nearly half, were under 
eighteen years of age, and 242,296 of the female sex, 
of whom 112,192 were less than eighteen years old. 
. . . In the cotton factories, ^6]4 per cent.; in the 
woollen mills, 69^ per cent.; in the flax-spining mills, 
7o>^ per cent, of all operatives are of the female sex."^ 
If factory conditions were bad, the home con- 
ditions of these operatives were inexpressibly worse. 
Where all accounts agree, "bne should no doubt dis- 
miss his skepticism; and yet the often-told tale of 
human wretchedness and human degradation in 
the tenement districts of the manufacturing towns 
almost passes belief, even for the sophisticated 
student of slum conditions. "From some recent 
inquiries on the subject," says Gaskell, "it would 
appear that upward of 20,000 individuals live 
in cellars in Manchester alone." ^ "A full fifth of 

^ Ibid., 142. Probably the only place where "model" factory con- 
ditions were to be seen was at the New Lanark mills under the manage- 
ment of Robert Owen. The weekly wages there for boys under i8 were 
4s. 5d.; for women, 6s.; for men, 9s. iid. Piece-workers received from 
25 to 50 per cent. more. Owen fixed the minimum age at 10, and allowed 
children frorft 5 to 10 to attend his school free of charge. For some time 
the hours of labor were 14 per day. "It was not until January, 1816, 
that he was enabled to reduce the hours to 12 a day, with i and J4 hours 
for meals, leaving 10 and ^ hours for actual work." (Podmore, Life of 
Owen, I, 92.) 

^Manufacturing Population of England, 138. 



20 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the population, more than 45,000 human beings, 
of Liverpool,'' says Engels, "live in cellar dwell- 
ings." ^ He found the situation as bad or worse in 
other cities. Even at this distance of time one can 
scarcely read without a shudder the descriptions of 
endless ranges of houses along the "unpaved and 
unsewered" back streets of the industrial centers, 
into which the tired throngs of toilers poured at 
the end of one day, and from which they emerged 
at the dawn of the next. These rickety hovels were 
not only filthy and over-crowded; they were centers 
where the common decencies of life were hardly 
known, or if they were known were not practiced. 
Here vice and drunkenness, crime and poverty, 
flourished in their natural habitat and throve as 
weeds thrive in a neglected barnyard.^ Readers of 
Dickens and Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell and Kingsley, 
Bulwer-Lytton and Charles Reade — to mention only 
the most famous names — will recall how vividly 
these writers have set forth the state of society that 
followed in the wake of the industrial revolution. 
One institution after another of that day, the church, 

^ Condition of the Working-Class y 36. 

2 For prostitution and crime the reader is referred to Engels. On 
drunkenness he says: "Sheriff Alison asserts that in Glasgow some 
thirty thousand workingmen get drunk every Saturday night, and the 
estimate is certainly not exaggerated; and that in that city in 1830, one 
house in twelve, and in 1840, one house in ten, was a public-house. . . . 
Gaskell estimates secret distilleries in Manchester alone at more than 
a hundred. . . . When one has seen the extent of intemperance among 
the workers in England, one readily believes Lord Ashley's statement 
that this class annually expends something like twenty-five million 
pounds sterling upon intoxicating liquor." {Condition of the Working- 
Class, 126-128.) As to poverty we have the testimony of the historian 
of the period: in England in 18 15 "nearly one person in every eleven 
of the population was a pauper." (Walpole, History of England, I, 186.) 



THE NEW AGE 21 

the schools, the prisons, the workhouses, the fac- 
tories, they held up to scorn and just condemnation; 
one class of operatives after another, the miners, 
the iron-workers, the textile-workers, the tailors, 
they introduced into their pages, together with all 
the attendant evils in the industrial system, — sweat- 
ing, poisoning, "rattening," strikes, and the whole 
gamut of labor troubles. The distress of the iron- 
workers in the cutlery trades, — the employment 
of children in mines — those subterranean midgets 
who hauled tubs of coal from twelve to sixteen hours 
a day, — the tyranny of the "truck" system {i. e., 
payment for wages in goods from the company 
store, with short weight, higher prices, adulteration, 
and falsification of account), — the reduction of 
wages by petty underhand means such as fines and 
rebates, — the work of the factory girls begun so 
early in the morning that watchmen were engaged 
by districts to tap on the windows in order to 
awaken them, — the ever-increasing irritation and 
distrust between masters and men, — and around all, 
like the coils of a venomous reptile, the stretch of 
dilapidated tenements with their countless holes and 
corners where the Fagins and Quilps held sway: — it 
was the telling of these and other facts like them that 
made the mid- Vic tori an novel a powerful instrument 
for reform.^ 

^The treatment of the industrial revolution by the novelists is a 
chapter or a book by itself. The best accounts are in the following: 
Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford, Disraeli's Sybil, Dickens's Oliver Twist 
and Hard Times, Kingsley's Yeast and Alton Locke, Mrs. Gaskell's 
Mary Barton and North and South, Charles Reade's Never Too Late to 
Mend and Put Yourself in His Place. These novels present conditions, 
roughly speaking, before 1850. Mrs. Gaskell comes nearer to the actual 



22 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

But the workers did not wait for the novelists 
to make known their conditions to the world. It 
was inevitable that their own growing sense of 
distress should lead to protests and rebellion. Their 
attitude of mind is nowhere better described than 
in the words of Francis Place, whose life in the bor- 
ough of Westminster, London, was passed iii the 
center of radicalism and agitation. "A great mass 
of our unskilled and but little skilled labourers 
(among whom are the handloom weavers), and a 
very considerable number of our skilled labourers," 
he says, "are in poverty, if not in actual misery; 
a large portion of them have been in a state of pov- 
erty and great privation all their lives. They are 
neither ignorant of their condition nor reconciled 
to it. They live amongst others who are better off 
than themselves, with whom they compare them- 
selves; and they cannot understand why there 
should be so great a difference, why others who 
work no more or 'fewer hours than themselves at 
employment not requiring more actual exertion, 
and in many cases occupying fewer hours in the day, 
should be better paid than they are, and they come 
to the conclusion that the difference is solely caused 
by oppression — oppression of bad laws and avari- 
cious employers. To escape from this state is with 
them of paramount importance. Among a vast 

lives and thoughts of the working people; Reade offers most definite solu- 
tions; Kingsley describes the humbug of the established religion and 
applies the remedy of Christian socialism; Dickens (without suggesting 
specific cures) is the most vivid of all in his pictures of the haunts of 
vice and villainy in the cities. A valuable study of the whole field is to be 
found in Le Roman Social en Jngleterre, by Cazamian, 1904. 



THE NEW AGE 23 

multitude of these people not a day, scarcely an 
hour, can be said to pass without some circumstance, 
some matter exciting reflection, occurring to remind 
them of their condition, which (notwithstanding 
they have been poor and distressed from their in- 
fancy, and however much they may at times be 
cheerful) they scarcely ever cease, and never for a 
long period cease, to feel and to acknowledge to 
themselves with deep sensations of anguish their 
deplorable condition. "^ However ignorant and 
debased they might be, the unorganized workers 
were thus conscious of oppression and sullenly 
antagonistic toward their oppressors, and they 
therefore resorted to methods of personal violence 
and wanton lawlessness such as make the earlier 
history of industrialism a shameful record of crime 
and cruelty. Dynamiting, incendiarism, shooting, 
throwing of vitriol, persecutions of inventors of 
new machinery, persecutions of "knobsticks," — 
these and other acts of barbarity were then the 
invariable concomitant of industry. For the first 
twenty-five years of the century, or before the re- 
peal of the Combination Laws, the revolt of labor 
was individualistic rather than collective. Gradually 
the scattered masses drew together into organizations, 
at first secretly and often rather for the purposes 
of mutual benefit than for united effort against 
their employers. Then the era of trade unions 
and strikes began. It dawned upon the benighted 
consciousness of the proletariat that there was a 
mighty power in combination. Up and down Great 

1 Wallas, Lije of Places 382. 



24 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Britain unions were formed, and rebellion now be- 
came organized, persistent, and militant. "The 
incredible frequency of these strikes," says Engels, 
"proves best of all to what extent the social war 
has broken out all over England. No week passes, 
scarcely a day, indeed, in which there is not a strike 
in some direction."^ Despite the bitterness and the 
persistence of the struggle, however, labor's fight 
during the second quarter of the century was nearly 
always a losing one. "In council they are ideal- 
ists," say Mr. and Mrs. Webb, "dreaming of a new 
heaven and a new earth, humanitarians, education- 
alists, socialists, moralists: in battle they are still 
the struggling, half-emancipated serfs of 1825, — 
armed only with the rude weapons of the strike 
and boycott; sometimes feared and hated by the 
propertied classes; sometimes merely despised; al- 
ways oppressed, and miserably poor." ^ 

How could the situation be different when the 
odds against the laboring classes were so overwhelm- 
ing? All the effective weapons belonged to the 
other side, — political power, education, the law 
and the courts, the prestige of wealth and position, 
and the immense force of organized public opinion. 
The operative of that day was not only desperately 
poor and illiterate, — he had no vote. And if he had 
his day in court, he found that the magistrate re- 
garded him more as a chattel than as a human being. 

^ Engels, Condition of the Working-Class^ 224. 

"^History of Trade Unionism, 138. In a sketch like the present one 
it is obviously out of the question to deal with labor wars in any 
detail. There are many books on the subject by authorities, e. g., 
the Webbs, Cooke-Taylor, Innes, Hobhouse, Cunningham. 



THE NEW AGE 25 

Worse still, society thought that it was better for 
all concerned, including the worker himself, that 
he should remain in servitude. Compulsory school 
attendance was unknown. There were in England 
some infant schools, and later on some mechanics' 
institutes and a few ineffectual private day schools; 
but the only educational agency that the upper 
classes really desired to sustain was the Sunday 
school. It did not matter if the ragged juveniles 
of the factory districts could neither read nor write, 
provided they could make a tolerable showing in 
recitation of the incomprehensible tenets of the 
Church of England. A knowledge of the Thirty- 
nine Articles would make for peace and contentment, 
so a benevolent aristocracy reasoned; whereas a 
knowledge of the ''three r's" might provoke trouble.^ 
Illiteracy, therefore, was the rule, literacy the excep- 
tion. "Rather more than 570,000 were not wholly 
destitute of educational advantages," says Wal- 
pole, speaking of conditions from 1 8 1 5 to 1 820. " But 
there must, at the very least, have been 2,000,000 
children requiring education. So that for one child, 
who had the opportunity of education, three were 
left entirely ignorant." ^ "In Birmingham," says 
Engels, writing in 1844, "more than half the children 
between five and fifteen years attend no school 
whatsoever. ... In the Potteries district, . . . 
three-fourths of the children examined by the Com- 
missioner could neither read nor write, while the 

1 For the attitude of the aristocracy see Wallas, Life of Placey 112; 
Walpole, History of England, I, 186-9. 
^History of England, I, 186. 



26 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

whole district is plunged in the deepest ignorance. 
Children who have attended Sunday school for years 
could not tell one letter from another." ^ 

The ignorant worker and his ignorant family, 
therefore, received scant consideration from the law 
and the legislature. Non-interference, laissez-faire^ 
were the order of the day. After the repeal in 1813- 
14 of the old Elizabethan statute of Apprenticeship 
(a law enacted in 1563 giving justices power to fix 
wages and prescribing certain regulations as to 
apprenticeship), "the last remnant of that legislative 
protection of the Standard of Life which survived 
from the Middle Ages" was swept away. 2 Free, 
individual bargaining was the sole method of fixing 
wages. "A single master," said Lord Jeffrey in 
1825, "was at liberty at any time to turn off the whole 
of his workmen at once — 100 or 1000 in number — if 
they would not accept the wages he chose to offer. 
But it was made an offence for the whole of the work- 
men to leave that master at once if he refused to give 
the wages they chose to require." ^ The spirit of the 
typical British legislator, as well as of the typical 
British employer, for a full half century, is well 
shown in the words of a parliamentary committee of 
1806, which declare that "the right of every man to 
employ the capital he inherits, or has acquired, ac- 
cording to his own discretion, without molestation or 
obstruction, so long as he does not infringe on the 
rights or property of others, is one of those privileges 

\ 

1 Condition of the Working-Class^ 200, 207. 

2 Webb, History of Trade Unionism, 55. 
» Ibid., 63. 



THE NEW AGE 27 

which the free and happy constitution of this country- 
has long accustomed every Briton to consider as 
his birthright." ^ The statement reminds one of the 
classical remark in 1829 of the Duke of Newcastle 
concerning his practice of selling rotten boroughs to 
the highest bidder: "Have I not the right to do what 
I like with my own?" It was to be expected, there- 
fore, that the attitude of authority should be almost 
exclusively in favor of the propertied classes, and that 
the "ignorant and avaricious" workmen should be 
left to the tender mercies of the magistrates, who ap- 
pear to have treated offenders much as Mr. Bumble, 
the beadle, treated juvenile paupers. "Justice was 
entirely out of the question," says Francis Place; 
"the workingmen could seldom obtain a hearing 
before a magistrate — never without impatience and 
insult; and never could they calculate on even an 
approximation to a rational conclusion. . . . Could 
an accurate account be given of proceedings, of 
hearings before magistrates, trials of sessions and in 
the Court of King's Bench, the gross injustice, the 
foul invective and terrible punishments inflicted, 
would not, after a few years have passed away, be 
credited on any but the best of evidence." ^ The 
culmination of these grievances was a complete 
political disability of the working classes. Arnold 
Toynbee stated the literal truth when he said that 
"except as a member of the mob, the labourer had 
not a shred of political influence." ^ 

1 Webb, History of Trade Unionism^ 56. 

2 Wallas, Life of Place, 198. 

^Industrial Revolution, 186. The state of the franchise prior to 1832, 
when the first Reform Bill was passed, is too well known to need dis- 



28 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

This deplorable state of affairs in the new indus- 
trialism was not due to an irresponsible sovereign 
and a parliament of reactionary landlords alone. It 
was immensely furthered by the political and eco- 
nomic doctrines of the time. The eighteenth century 
had been a period of rigid economic control, a policy 
inherited from the centuries before and modified to 
suit contemporary needs. By a system of bounties 
on exports and duties on imports, by acts of parlia- 
ment to regulate wages (in the interests of landlord 
and corporation), by rigidly monopolistic control of 
the corporations over trades, by cheap labor and 
high corn, governmental authority was well-nigh 
absolute.^ It*vas the economic and political creed of 
the propertied classes then in power. Against these 
old repressive measures the thought of the new cen- 
tury set up a determined revolt. The fundamental 
postulate of the economic teaching of the new age 
was individual freedom and non-interference from the 
state. One after another the old medieval restric- 
tions were thrown overboard; for according to the 
pilots of the new school the ship of state could make 
no headway while loaded down with cumbrous and 
obsolete machinery. The founders of this school 

cussion, even if there were any good reason for entering into it here. 
Toynbee's statement covers the whole ground. One of the best ex- 
tended accounts of the old corrupt rotten borough system and the grow- 
ing agitation against it is Walpole's, in his History of England from 1815. 
See especially Ch. II of Vol. I, and pp. 314-342 of Vol. II; also pp. 208- 
244 of Vol. III. For the attitude of the radicals, Chapters 9, 10, and 
II of Wallas's Life of Place are of great value. 

^ "They endeavoured to regulate the clothes which the living should 
wear, and the shrouds in which the dead should be buried." (Walpole, 
History, I, 215.) 



THE NEW AGE 29 

were Adam Smith and Jeremy Ben'tham, one the 
father of political economy, the other the father of 
philosophical radicalism.^ According to Bentham's 
"gospel of enlightened selfishness," the end of action 
was happiness, and happiness resulted from a selfish 
pursuit of pleasure, — pleasure, too, that sprang from 
"material consequences." When a man by dexterous 
additions and subtractions of the fourteen pleasures 
and the twelve pains to which he was liable could 
deduct for himself a net surplus of pleasure he might 
be accounted happy, — such was the calculation of 
Bentham's arithmetical hedonism. And the end of 
society was reached, upon this theory, when the 
greatest number of individuals in it could secure the 
largest net result of happiness: — a consummation 
which would come, be it remembered, only when each 
person was allowed unrestricted freedom in the pur- 
suit of his own interests. The function of govern- 
ment, on this doctrine, was negative and restraining 
only. It would see that the selfish desires of men did 
not clash (if collisions were possible!), and it would 
keep the way clear for the unfettered competition of 
men in the race for the goods of life. The world, in 
the thought of Bentham and his early disciples, was 
thus a collocation of human units, — the idea is J. S. 

* Bentham said of himself: "I am the spiritual father of James Mill, 
James Mill is the spiritual father of Ricardo, therefore, I am the spiritual 
grandfather of Ricardo." (Quoted By Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, 
3.) James Mill, J. S. Mill, Grote, the Austins, all the intellectual radi- 
cals of the time go back to Bentham; so, too, do the parliamentary 
leaders. Sir Francis Burdett, Sir J. Cam Hobhouse, and Joseph Hume; 
and also the radical agitator, Francis Place. It was by Bentham's money 
and initiative that the Westminster Review, the radical organ, was 
founded in 1824. 



30 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Mill's also, — each following his own interest, and 
each kept fron^ "jostling one another" by "law, 
religion, and public opinion/* So conceived, society- 
becomes, in Sir Leslie Stephen's apt phrase, a crea- 
tion of "universal cohesion out of universal repul- 
sion/* 

The political economy of Adam Smith rests upon 
assumptions practically identical with those of 
Bentham and the philosophical radicals. In fact the 
economists built upon foundations laid by the radi- 
cals, just as the radicals adopted the new doctrines of 
the "classical school." ^ The economic order, — such 
was the teacljing of Smith, — springs spontaneously 
from self-interest, that is to say, from the innate 
desire of every man to better himself. "The natural 
effort of every individual to better his own condition, 
when suffered to exert itself with freedom and secu- 
rity, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and 
without any assistance, not only capable of carrying 
on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of sur- 
mounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with 
which the folly of human laws too often incumbers 
its operations; though the effect of these obstructions 
is always more or less either to encroach upon its 
freedom, or to diminish its security. ... It is not 
from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or 
the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their 
regard to their own interest." ^ Such are the classic 
presuppositions of the father of political economy. 

^ I refer of course chiefly to Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo. Smith's 
Wealth of Nations came out in 1776; Malthus' Essays on population, 
in 1798; Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in 1817. 

2 Wealth of Nations, II, 43 ; I, 16. 



THE NEW AGE 31 

Man is best off when least disturbed in the pursuit of 
his own interests; and his own real interests do not 
collide with those of his neighbors, since what is best 
for him is best for them. Like Bentham^s, it is 
another plea for freedom, and in Smith's doctrine 
(in a day of corrupt and inefficient government) a 
plea even more for the poor man than for the capital- 
ist and the landlord.^ 

The economists who followed Smith — Malthus 
and Ricardo — adopted his presuppositions as axio- 
matic. But they went further and developed two 
doctrines which deserve to be singled out, because 
they so clearly suggest the influence of tile new 
economic teaching upon the welfare of the working 
class, — the theory of population and the wage-fund 
theory, both of which were law and gospel among the 
intellectual radicals for a half century and more. It 
was Malthus who formulated the famous law of 
increasing population and of diminishing returns. 
The population, he said, increases in a geometrical 
progression, while the means of subsistence increase 
only in an arithmetical progression; and therefore 
the food-supply of the world alwa;^s tends to be in- 

' "The patrimony of the poor man lies in the strength and dexterity 
of his hands; and to hinder him from employing the strength and dex- 
terity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor, 
is a plain violation of this most sacred property." On this theory govern- 
ment was left with little to do but to keep its hands off. "The sovereign 
is completely discharged from a duty," — and by sovereign Smith of 
course means the state — "in the attempting to perform which he must 
always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper perform- 
ance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be suflScient; 
the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of direct- 
ing it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the 
society." {Wealth of Nations ^ I, 123; II, 184.) 



y 



32 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

sufficient to feed the people, unless checks are found 
to reduce their numbers. Nature's check is death. 
And the first to feel the rigors of its law are the poor. 
But the poor are in the clutches of another law also, — 
the law of wages, — which collaborates with its fellow 
as smoothly as Spenlow collaborated with Jorkins in 
David Copperfield. The theory of wages was set 
forth by Mai thus, but it was elaborated and popular- 
ized by Ricardo. There is at any time, they said, a 
fixed sum of money that can go for wages; it is just 
sufficient to keep the wage-earners plodding along on 
the lowest level of existence: for if it is increased so 
that wages go up, the workers will multiply beyond 
the demand for labor and the means of subsistence, 
and the wage- fund will shrink to its old dimensions.* 
These laws, — so it was thought and taught, — were 
the creation of destiny, not to be altered by decree of 
parliament. 2 The fate of the worker was in his own 
hands. If he would better his condition, let him 
abjure the old Hebraic command to increase and 
multiply, and follow the new gospel of Malthus 
and Ricardo.^ 

^ The law refers of course to real wages, not to money wages. If the 
wages go up, but the prices of food go up, too, then the actual conditions 
remain the same. "The natural price of labor," said Ricardo, "is that 
price which is necessary to enable the laborers one with another to sub- 
sist and to perpetuate their race without either increase or diminution." 
(Quoted by Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrine, 157.) 

2 The suggestions of Malthus and others that the poor might exercise 
moral restraint to keep down their numbers were received with anathe- 
mas by the people of the regency and of the reign of George IV. Their 
piety seems to have been in inverse ratio, to their religion. 

3 "The people must comprehend that they are themselves the cause 
of their own poverty," said Malthus. (Gide and Rist, ibid., 1 19.) "Every 
suggestion which does not tend to the reduction in number of the working 
people is useless," said Francis Place. (Wallas, Life of Place, 174.) 



THE NEW AGE 33 

The popularity of this latest evangel for the poor 
was a measure of its acceptance. Its golden rules 
were regarded as truisms which a child might under- 
stand. Harriet Martineau diluted them down to 
what she thought was the capacity of juvenile 
intelligence in her nine volumes of Illustrations 
(1832-34). Maria Edgeworth in her letters declared 
that ladies of fashion wanted governesses who 
were "competent" in political economy. "Political 
Economy/' said Bagehot, "was a favorite subject 
in England from about 18 10 to about 1840, and 
this to an extent which the present generation can 
scarcely comprehend." ^ In 1830 John Stuart Mill 
spoke of Ricardo's book as "immortal." Cobbett 
thought that Malthus held in political economy 
a position like that of Newton in astronomy; he 
considered the Malthusian principle one "which 
never can be shaken." ^ Francis Place, an equally 
devout Malthusian, regarded the economists of 
his day as "the great enlighteners of the people." ^ 
Their instant and enormous vogue is not indeed 
difficult to make out from the vantage ground of 
history. The doctrines they stood for suited the 
temper of the times, were abundantly supported 
by common sense, and appeared to -rest upon un- 
changing foundations. ' Emanating chiefly from 
middle-class thinking, they furthered and fostered 
middle-class enterprises. "The economy of Ri- 
cardo and Mill," as Mr. Hobson says, "was never 

^ Bagehot, Economic Studies, 154. 

2 Melville, Life and Letters of CobbeU, I, 292-3. 

^ Wallas, Life of Place, 161; see also 166. 



34 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

political. ... It was simply the economy of the 
shrewd Lancashire mill manager 'writ large* and 
called political." ^ Again and again in their combats 
with parliamentary committees, the manufacturers 
used weapons that the radicals and economists had 
forged. "Have I not a right to do what I will with 
my own?" — this was their shibboleth when they 
came down to Westminster to defend themselves 
against obnoxious investigators. The typical factory- 
owner of the early Victorian era was not concerned 
with the condition of his workers, nor with any 
purely ^* human" equations. What he wanted was 
what the '* hard-headed" business man has always 
wanted, — the unchartered freedom to buy his raw 
material in the cheapest market, sell it in the dearest, 
pay only the wages he must pay to get the wor^ 
done, pocket his profits to do with as he liked, and 
let his laborers, when paid, look out for themselves 
as best they could. Was it possible for common 
sense to deny the validity of such a position ? And 
if practice needed the support of precept, one had 
only to turn again to the high priests of the sacred 
science. "Political economy," said Nassau Senior, 
holder at Oxford of the first chair of political economy 
in England and author of one of the first text-books 
on the subject, "political economy is not greedy 

^ of facts; it is independent of facts." 

/ Obviously, then, the social philosophy of the day 
did not much concern itself with the wage-earner. 
His status in life was fixed. His condition within 
that status was subject to his personal control, a 

^ Hobson, John Ruskin : Social Reformer ^ 93 . 



THE NEW AGE 35 

matter of private, not of public, interest. He might 
bargain individually with his employer, and might 
take his chances with his fellows in the general 
scramble, but if he attempted to bargain collectively 
he was a menace to society. It is plain to-day that 
all this was anything but, "free and unlimited com- 
petition"; for the workers as individuals were help- 
less against the organized power and wealth of the 
captains of industry. The situation was accurately 
stated by Arnold Toynbee, when he said that while 
the political economy of that day sought to establish 
^^Jree competition of equal industrial units^* what it 
really helped to establish was "free competition of 
unequal industrial units." ^ Without the support, 
therefore, of justice-loving men from the upper- 
classes, who builded even better than they knew, 
the proletariat might not have risen from servitude 
except through revolution. 

But during the first thirty years or so of the cen- 
tury, up to the period when Carlyle entered the 
field as a critic of industrial society, some progress 
towards an improved Standard of Life had been 
made. The Factory Acts of 1802, 18 19, and 1833 
were passed, and in 1824-5 the Combination Laws 
were repealed. ^ The repeal of these laws was of 

* Toynbee, Industrial Revolution^ 17. 

'^The Factory Act of 1802, introduced by Sir Robert Peel, father 
of the famous Sir Robert, applied only to apprentices in cotton mills. 
Among its provisions were: whitewashing of rooms in factories; instruc- 
tion of apprentices in reading, writing, arithmetic, and limitation of 
working hours to 12. The act did not apply to "free" labor, and it 
did not in any way limit the age of employment. The Act of 1819 for- 
bade employment of children up to nine years of age, restricted the hours 
of work for those under i6 years to 12 hours per day less i}i hours for 



36 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

immense importance to the working world. "The 
right of collective bargaining, involving the power 
to withhold labor from the market by concerted 
action, was for the first time expressly established." ^ 
Foremost among the men who led in the various 
movements for betterment were Place, Cobbett, 
Robert Owen, and, later. Lord Ashley, seventh 
Earl of Shaftesbury. Place and Cobbett, them- 
selves sprung from the working classes, were the 
most practical of the reformers. To them real reform 
began with political reform. They saw the futility 
of any progress in the industrial and agricultural 
communities while parliament, under the sway of 
the old rotten borough system, was in the control 
of Tory landlords who accomplished their ends 
through the most open, wholesale, and shameless 
methods of bribery known in the political history 
of England. Cobbett, through his twopenny 
Political Register (i 802-1 836), and Place, largely 
through an extraordinary direct personal influence, 

meals, and limited the total hours of work per week to 72. Like the 
previous act it applied only to cotton mills. It contained no provision 
for education, and none for inspection, leaving violations to be reported 
by common informers. The Act of 1833 "prohibited night-work to 
all young persons under eighteen; it allowed no child under nine to work 
except in silk mills, and it prescribed a limitation of hours of labor to 
nine in one day, or forty-eight in a week, for every child under eleven, 
on the first passing of the Act; a year later this restriction was to apply 
to all children under twelve, and, again, in a year's time to all children 
under thirteen." (Slater, Making of Modern England^ 124.) Young people 
between thirteen and eighteen years of age were restricted to a twelve- 
hour day. This act applied to all textile industries, and was to be made 
effective by the appointment of four government inspectors. 

The Combination Laws, passed in 1799 and 1800, made all combina- 
tions among operatives illegal on the ground of restraint of trade. They 
were a powerful weapon for the manufacturers up to 1825. 

1 Webb, History of Trade Unionism, 97. 



THE NEW AGE 37 

incessantly advocated an extensive and thorough- 
going reform of parliament, including universal 
manhood suffrage and voting by ballot.^ Though 
the Reform Bill of 1832 did not secure the relief which 
these stout agitators demanded, it effectually broke 
up the old system and was a long stride in the right 
direction. The work of Owen, first great socialist, 
though not so directly practical as that of Cobbett 
and Place, was perhaps even more influential, at 
least if its total effect is taken into account. A 
dreamer, dreaming of a golden age, "to come sud- 
denly like a thief in the night," as he said, Owen pic- 
tured a new terrestrial paradise, where through a 
rational system of universal education, favorable 
environment and "villages of co-operation and 
equality," competition and capitalism would be no 
more and mortals would live happily upon a plane 
of mutual ownership and social equality. His 
dreams faded into nothingness or vanished into 
Utopia, where like other visions of other visionaries 
they may be awaiting the slow upward march of 
humanity. But he left behind him achievements 
of a more substantial kind. He reformed conditions 
in his own mills at New Lanark, so that these mills 
became a model, in a distressing period, of what 

i"In January, 1817, Cobbett's Register was selling 50,000 a week of 
its twopenny edition." (Wallas, Life^ 124.) Samuel Bamford, the radical, 
wrote of Cobbett's paper: "They were read on nearly every cottage 
hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of 
Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scotch manu- 
facturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his 
readers to the true cause of their sufferings — misgovernment; and to its 
proper correction — parliamentary reform." (Melville, Life of Cobbett, 
II, 7S') 



38 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

factories should be. He labored unremittingly to 
secure a decent Standard of Life in factories every- 
where (by minimum time and minimum wage), 
and he was directly influential in securing early 
factory legislation. With the fervor of an apostolic 
Christian, he went straight to the operatives all 
over Great Britain, denouncing competition among 
the capitalists and preaching union and co-operation 
among the workers. For twenty years (i 8 15-1835) 
Owen was probably the greatest single force in 
bringing the laboring world to a realization of its 
//collective strength; and the far-spread seed of his 
I planting bore fruit manyfold in the years to come. 
I Progress, then, there was. Competition and 
laissez-faire had been openly attacked, and at some 
points they were decisively routed. But the field 
stretched interminably ahead toward the ultimate 
objective, and there were unnumbered obstacles 
looming up with every new advance. Even the most 
radical reformers were largely guided by middle-class 
ideals and could see the battle only from their own 
point of view. Owen, with the temper of an intoler- 
ant idealist who distrusts compromises and half- 
measures, held aloof from all political activity, and 
took no part in the reform movement of 1832, nor in 
the long struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws, nor 
in the momentous Chartist agitations, although his 
teaching told strongly upon many of the leading 
Chartists, and upon the beginnings of trade-unionism. 
His appeal for help was mainly addressed to benevo- 
lent members of the upper-classes, for his idea of 
reform savored of the aristocratic method of reaching 



THE NEW AGE 39 

down to the masses below, to alleviate, not to recon- 
struct. The radicals, philosophical and political 
alike, true to their creed, were willing to remove old 
restrictions, but resisted the imposition of new. 
James Mill regarded the middle-class as a model for 
the masses; ^'the great majority of the people," said 
he, "never cease to be guided by that rank." Ri- 
cardo believed in the repeal of the Combination Laws, 
but did not favor the restrictions imposed by the 
Factory Acts. His disciple, Joseph Hume, a leader 
among the parliamentary radicals, and a co-worker 
with Place, led in the fight for the repeal of the Com- 
bination Laws in 1824, while in 1833 he contended 
that the passing of the Factory Acts was "pernicious 
and a libel" upon the humanity of the masters. 
Even Place himself, the most consistently practical 
of all the agitators, and a fearless and open fighter 
against injustice and tyranny, thought that after the 
repeal of the Laws, combinations among workmen 
would "fall to pieces," because workmen had com- 
bined only to resist the oppression of the old regula- 
tions, not to promote the creation of new. Middle- 
class opinion continued to predominate in the halls of 
legislature, in the councils of party, and in the circles 
of the intellectual element for a good many years to 
come. The worker of 1832, like the worker of 1800, 
was without political rights; the education of his 
children except for a few well-intentioned, but pietis- 
tic and ineffectual efforts of experimenters and par- 
sons, was wholly unprovided for; and government 
was only making faint and hesitating headway in the 
betterment of conditions in which he was fated to 



40 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

live. Under the stress of circumstances, however, 
there was in him a growing sense of injustice and of 
the power of union with his fellows. Meantime, as 
the years went on and as industry, commerce, and 
wealth expanded to gigantic proportions, a knowledge 
of the worker's condition spread abroad in society 
and new champions came forward to espouse his 
cause. Among these were two men of genius, with 
whom the present study is concerned, Thomas 
Carlyle and John Ruskin, prophets of revolt and 
heralds of a new day of justice. 



CHAPTER II 

SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 

"One can predict, without gift of prophecy, that the 
era of routine is nearly ended. Cost what it may, by one 
means or another, the toiHng multitudes of this perplexed, 
over-crowded Europe must and will find governors. 
* Laissez-faire, Leave them to do'.? The thing they will 
do, if so left, is too frightful to think of! It has been done 
once, in sight of the whole earth, in these generations: can 
it need to be done a second time?" — Carlyle, 

The life of Carlyle was coincident with the momen- 
tous events of the new era. Born in 1795 and living 
until 1 88 1, he was a spectator of the social transfor- 
mations that went on in England and in Europe dur- 
ing the better part of the century, and that brought 
men face to face with new conditions and forced upon 
them new and newer conclusions. Graduated from 
the University of Edinburgh in 1814, the year before 
Napoleon was overthrown at Waterloo, he saw the 
unfolding of a great social and political drama, 
action and reaction, revolution and counter-revolu- 
tion, such as made Europe a battle-ground between 
the old order and the new for more than half a cen- 
tury. The distress and revolts following upon the 
Napoleonic era, the "Carbonari rebellions and other 
political tumults*' in Italy and Spain, the revolutions 
of 1830 and 1848 in Belgium and France, — "lava- 
torrents of fever frenzy, and immense explosions of 
democracy," Carlyle called them, — the unification of 

41 



42 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Italy and of Germany, and the giant onward stride 
of industrialism and democracy everywhere; — these 
were events, or rather angry portents, that followed 
one upon another in the countries across the channel. 
At home affairs were no less charged with ominous 
meaning, and Carlyle watched them at close range. 
He wrote his earliest essays at Edinburgh and at 
Craigenputtock amid " the din and frenzy of Catholic 
Emancipations and Rotten Boroughs." He was in 
London in the winter of 1831-32, during the pro- 
longed fight on the Reform Bill, having temporarily 
left the solitude of Craigenputtock in the vain hope 
of finding a publisher for Sartor Resartus. And after 
1834 as a permanent resident in London he witnessed 
with growing amazement and apprehension every- 
thing that went on about him in the political and 
industrial world, from the Chartist movements, the 
Corn Law agitations, and the rise of trade-unions, to 
the passing of the Reform Bill of 1 867, which -the then 
venerable prophet of Chelsea regarded as England's 
final plunge over the precipice and into the whirlpool 
of democracy. No spectator could have been more 
alive to the momentousness of these changes than 
Carlyle. To him the entire period was one of transi- 
tion and unrest; an age in a state of flux, ever on the 
verge of revolution, and nowhere resting upon sure 
and settled foundations. "There is a deep-lying 
struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless 
grinding collision of the New with the Old," he said 
in 1829.1 Almost forty years later he read the signs 
of the times to the same effect: "There probably 

* ^igns of the Times, 252. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 43 

never was since the Heptarchy ended, or almost since 
it began, so hugely critical an epoch in the history of 
England as this we have now entered upon." ^ And 
when he asked himself and his readers what was the 
nature of this crisis, what it was that ** bursts asunder 
the bonds of ancient Political Systems, and perplexes 
all Europe with the fear of Change," his answer was 
ready: it was, he said, "the increase of social re- 
sources, which the old social methods will no longer 
sufficiently administer." ^ 

Carlyle's interest in revolutionary movements was 
passionate and profound from the first. He was 
hardly out of college when " the condition of England 
question" became, and to the end of his days re- 
mained, the central theme of his thought, his in- 
quiries, and his talk. It was a constant subject of 
discussion between him and his friend Edward 
Irving, in the early days when both were teaching at 
Kirkcaldy. His first political and social essay. 
Signs of the Times, 1829, found its way to Paris, where 
it aroused the interest of the Society of St. Simo- 
nians. These ardent dreamers of a new order at once 
began to solicit the attention of the mystic radical of 
Craigenputtock, and were hopeful that they might 
make a disciple of him. They dispatched a parcel of 
books and pamphlets to Carlyle, and for a time 
undoubtedly much engaged his interest in their 
doctrines, even though Goethe warned him to keep 
clear of their influence. He directed his brother 
John, then in London, to send him their books; and he 
translated St. Simon's chief work, Nouveau Christian- 

1 Shooting Niagara, 200. 2 Assays, IV, 34. 



44 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ismey with a short introduction, and sent it to his 
brother to be sold to a publisher.^ His mind was 
very evidently running on the social teachings of 
these enthusiasts when he set foot in London in 1831, 
for he records that at an eating-house on his arrival 
in August, he began discussing social problems among 
some Frenchmen, "one of whom ceases eating to 
hear the talk of the St. Simonians." ^ In that epoch 
the disciples of St. Simon were "stirring and con- 
spicuous objects," and Carlyle came into personal 
contact with a number of them, notably Gustave 
d^Eichthal and Detrosier, the latter of whom was 
then lecturing to the working classes of Manchester. 
Although they may have wandered into strange 
paths, to the transcendentalist of Craigenputtock 
they seemed to have laid hold of momentous but 
neglected truths concerning the spiritual and social 
nature of man, and to have been a notable sign of the 
times. And when he returned to the solitude of his 
home, he offered to write an essay on the society, but 
magazine editors were again deaf to his proposals. 
Readers of Sartor Resartus will recall that the society 
transmitted its propositions to Teufelsdrockh (who 
comments: "here also are men who have discovered, 
not without amazement, that Man is still Man"), 
and that the strange disappearance of the clothes- 
philosopher was perhaps to be accounted for on the 
ground that he had gone to join the St. Simonians! 
But these heralds of a new Christianity from Paris 

^ Apparently without success. There is no evidence that it was pub- 
lished at that time, or that it has appeared since. 
2 Two Note Booksy 193. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 45 

were by no means the only sources from which Car- 
lyle, during his six months in London in 1 831-1832, 
added to his already abundant store of knowledge 
and enthusiasm concerning the problems of the day. 
A radical, even though a spiritual and speculative 
one, he was not without some hopes of becoming 
himself the center of a mystical school, to which 
might be drawn the younger spirits of the radical 
group then dominant in London political circles. He 
had many walks and talks with John Stuart Mill, 
"a fine clear enthusiast, who will one day come to 
something." ^ He saw again on frequent occasions 
his old pupil, the brilliant Charles Buller, soon to be a 
rising member of parliament and the hope of the 
parliamentary radicals. These two men, Mill and 
Buller, together with Irving (now a popular London 
preacher), brought Carlyle into somewhat close 
touch with utilitarian circles; — with John Austin, the 
legalist, with Bowring, the friend and biographer of 
Bentham, and editor of the Westminster Review; with 
Molesworth, founder of the London Review, and many 
others. We may be sure that the outpouring of utili- 
tarianism from these sources was more than met by 
copious floods of "Teufelsdrockhist" mysticism from 

^ Froude, Life ofCarlyk, II (Edition of 1882-4, ^Y Scribner's), 162. In a 
letter to John Sterling (October, 183 1) Mill describes Carlyle, whom he 
has just met. Among other things he says: "He has by far the widest 
liberality and tolerance that I have met with in any one; and he differs 
from most men, who see as much as he does into the defects of the age, 
by a circumstance greatly to his advantage in my estimation, that he 
looks for a safe landing before and not behind; he sees that if we could only 
replace things as they once were, we should only retard the final issue, as 
we should in all probability go on just as we then did, and arrive at the 
very place where we now stand." {Letters of John Stuart Mill, I, 16.) 



46 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the lips of Carlyle, who was each day stronger in his 
conviction that what the times needed most was not 
Benthamism, but "the doctrine of the Phoenix, of 
Natural Supernaturalism, and the whole Clothes 
Philosophy!" ^ Through the offices of Francis 
Jeffrey, now no longer editor of the Edinburgh Review 
but member of parliament, he visited the old unre- 
formed House of Commons, where he heard Althrop, 
Wetherell, and Joseph Hume, all of them protagonists 
in the struggle for better political conditions. It 
would be easy to extend the list of these contacts 
which Carlyle was fortunate enough to secure in the 
winter of 1831-32. A little later after he established 
his residence in London (1834) his house was for years 
a kind of shrine to which many of the most passionate 
spirits of the age made pilgrimage for guidance and 
inspiration; — among the most famous being Godfroi 
Cavaignac, in exile from France for conspiracy 
against Louis Philippe; Louis Blanc, the celebrated 
French socialist leader of 1848 days; and the beloved 
Mazzini, organizer and soul of new Italy. The oracle 
in those times was rather more apt to express himself 
in hoarse thunder, 

*' winged with red lightning and impetuous rage," 

than in articulate speech. But the worshipers came 
none the less, for they saw here a man who had passed 
through a profound spiritual experience and whose 
discussion of the times was lighted up with a passion- 
ate sense of social justice and with an equally passion- 
ate sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Emerson 

^ Froude, Life of Carlyle, II, 145. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 47 

had found this out when he made his pilgrimage to 
Craigenputtock in 1833. "He still returned to 
English pauperism/* said Emerson, speaking of their 
earnest talks together, "the crowded country, the 
selfish abdication by public men of all that public 
persons should perform. Government should direct 
poor men what to do." ^ 

Carlyle's interest in social and industrial con- 
ditions was altogether too serious to permit him to 
remain satisfied with discussion among thinkers 
and theorists and agitators alone. He wished to 
see the working world with his own eyes and when- 
ever possible to speak with the operatives face to 
face. He began to carry out his wishes early. In 
181 8 while he and his friend Irving were still at 
Kirkcaldy, they took a vacation walking tour through 
the Trossachs and visited the celebrated model 
school of Robert Owen at New Lanark Mills on the 
Clyde; being already familiar with Owenite teachings 
and wishing to see this earliest realization of them. 
Two years later, when Irving had become assistant 
pastor to the famous Dr. Chalmers of Glasgow, 
Carlyle paid him a visit there, and talked with the 
"Radical Weavers" who were spreading consterna- 
tion and terror far and wide with their rioting. ^ For 

^English TraitSy 17 (Centenary Edition), 

2 It was during the 1817 vacation tour that Carlyle first saw steamers 
on the water. It was at Greenock, on the Firth of Clyde: "queer little 
dumpy things, with a red sail to each, bobbing about there and making 
continual passages to Glasgow." At Liverpool in August, 183 1, on his 
way to London with the manuscript of Sartor, he had his first sight of 
* steam-coaches,' on the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which had 
been opened the year before. It was not until 1839 that he made his 
6rst journey by rail, going from London to Preston: "the whirl through 



48 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

many yeare. at least up to 1852, when he retired to 
the seclusion of his sound-proof room for the long 
grapple with the history of Frederick the Great, 
he seems rarely to have missed an opportunity to 
see for himself the storm-centers of the new era. In 
1824 he spent two months in Birmingham, with its 
"thousand funnels." In that roaring center of flame 
and smoke, there must have been little which his 
devouring eyes did not discover; for he inspected 
the blast-furnaces and the iron-works ('* where 
150,000 men are smelting the metal"), and he de- 
scended into the mines, "poking about industriously 
into Nature's and Art's sooty arcana." Twenty- 
five years later he visited the iron and coal indus- 
tries at Merthyr Tydvil, Wales, where some 50,000 
"grimy mortals" were "screwing out a livelihood 
for themselves amid their furnaces, pits, and rolling 
mills." ^ A little before this, in 1847, he had been 
at Manchester, having stopped there on his way to 
the old home at Scotsbrig, "to see iron works and 
cotton mills; to talk with some of the leaders of the 
working men, who were studying his writings with 
passionate interest." ^ While at Manchester he took 
a day to visit Rochdale and the mills of John Bright 
and his brother Jacob. A talk between the distin- 
guished anti-cornlaw leader and the gaunt mystic 
of Cheyne Row appears not to have gone off very 
smoothly: "John and I discorded in our views not 

the confused darkness, on these steam wings, was one of the strangest 
things I have experienced — hissing and dashing on, one knew not 
whither." (Froude, Life of Carlyle, III, 144.) 

1 Froude, Life of Carlyle, IV, 44. 

^Ibid., Ill, 35 1. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 49 

a little, . . . the result was that I got to talking 
occasionally in the Annandale accent, . . . and 
shook peaceable Brightdom as with a passing earth- 
quake/* ^ At another time when visiting at Matlock 
Bath, Carlyle walked out to have a look at Ark- 
wright's Mills: "one of them, the Cromford one if 
I mistake not,' t\it first erected mill in England, and 
consequently the Mother of all Mills." ^ He went 
through the workhouses at St. Ives and the 'model* 
prisons of London; and from workingmen and 
agitators on all sides he learned about a great many 
more English industries and institutions than he 
could inspect for himself. In 1846 he spent six days 
observing conditions in Ireland under the guidance 
of some ardent "Young Irelanders," when he heard 
a speech at Dublin by the great O'Connell, "chief 
quack of the then world." Three years later he 
gave up five weeks to a more extended tour of ob- 
servation in Ireland, at a time when the plight of 
the poor seemed desperate. His letters and journals 
are strewn with comments and lamentations upon 
the social disturbances everywhere, which seemed 
to loom up as lurid portents of disaster. The rick- 
burning in 1830 "all over the south and middle of 
England"; "the frightful riots at Bristol" in 1831, — 
"all the public buildings burnt, and many private 
houses," — suggesting to Carlyle that "a second 
edition of the French revolution" was within the 
range of chances; "the paupers of Manchester 
helping themselves out of shops, great bands of them 
parading with signals of want of bread," in 1837; 

1 Froude, Life of Carlyle, III, 352. 2 j^fg,^ Letter Sy II, 41. 



50 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the poor almost at his own door in Chelsea tearing 
up the garden palings in the winter of 1842, and 
stealing them for fuel; the marching of the army of 
discontented Chartists in the streets of London in 
18485 — these and many other outbursts of insur- 
rectionary radicalism he made record of as ominous 
signs of the times during the disturbed decades of 
1830, 1840, and 1850.1 

The transformations wrought upon the surface 
of society, as well as in its structure, by the coming 
of this new order, were seen and understood by 
Carlyle. His descriptions of them are in language 
characteristically vivid and powerful. The canal 
building of Brindley, who "chained seas together," 
the spinning wheel of Arkwright, who gave England 
"the power of cotton," the steam-engine of Watt, 
who with grim brow and blackened fingers searched 
out in his workshop "the Fire-secret," — these 
thaumaturgic instrumentalities of industry seemed 
to Carlyle fit theme for a modern epic, the epic of 
Tools and the Man! If not yet sung, it is at least 
written, he says, "in huge characters on the face of 
this Planet, — sea-miles, cotton-trades, railways, 
fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New 
Hollands; legible throughout the Solar System! . . . 
The Prospero evoked the singing of Ariel, and took 
captive the world with those melodies: the same 
Prospero can send his Fire-demons panting across 
all oceans; shooting with the speed of meteors, on 
cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms; 
and make Iron his missionary, preaching its evangel 

^ Froude, Life of Carlyle y II, 74, 179; New Letters y I, 69. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 51 

to the brute Primeval Powers, which listen and obey: 
neither is this small. Manchester, with its cotton- 
fuzz, the smoke and dust, its tumult and contentious 
squalor, is hideous to thee? Think not so: a precious 
substance, beautiful as magic dreams, and yet no 
dream but a reality, lies hidden in that noisome 
wrappage; — a wrappage struggling indeed (look at 
Chartisms and such like) to cast itself off and leave 
the beauty free and visible there! Hast thou heard, 
with sound ears, the awakening of a Manchester, 
on Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock; 
the rushing-ofF of its thousand mills, like the boom 
of an Atlantic tide, ten-thousand times ten-thousand 
spools and spindles all set humming there, — it is per- 
haps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or 
more so. Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the 
naked in its result; the triumph of man over matter 
in its means. Soot and despair are not the essence 
of it; they are divisible from it. . . . It was proved 
by fluxionary calculus, that steamers could never 
get across from the farthest point of Ireland to the 
nearest of Newfoundland; impelling force, resisting 
force, maximum here, minimum there; by law of 
Nature, and geometric demonstration: — what could 
be done? The Great Western could weigh anchor 
from Bristol Port; that could be done. The Great 
Western, bounding safe through the gullets of the 
Hudson, threw her cable out on the capstan of New 
York, and left our still moist paper-demonstration 
to dry itself at leisure." ^ 
The Scottish brassmith's idea^ traveling on fire- 

^ Past and Present, 138; Chartism, 165, 174. 



52 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

wings, was in truth swiftly overturning "the whole 
old system of Society," as Carlyle saw; "and, for 
Feudalism and Preservation of the Game, preparing 
us, by indirect but sure methods. Industrialism and 
the Government of the Wisest. . . . On every hand, 
the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to 
make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The 
shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls 
into iron fingers that ply it faster. . . . Even the 
horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire- 
horse yoked in his stead. . . . The giant Steam en- 
gine in a giant English nation will here create vio- 
lent demand for labor, and will there annihilate de- 
mand. . . . English Commerce stretches its fibres 
over the whole earth; sensitive literally, nay quiver- 
ing in convulsion, to the farthest influences of the 
earth. The huge demon of Mechanism smokes and 
thunders, panting at his great task, in all sections of 
English land; changing his shape like a very Proteus; 
and infallibly, at every change of shape, oversetting 
whole multitudes of workmen, and as if with the wav- 
ing of his shadow from afar, hurling them asunder, 
this way and that, in their crowded march and course 
of work or traffic; so that the wisest no longer knows 
his whereabout." ^ Very evidently from such ac- 
counts Carlyle was alive to the movements of society 
that were going on underneath the surface. The 
omnipotence of the new machinery, scattering work- 
shops everyw^^re, creating "new ganglions of popu- 
lation," new multitudes of cunning toilers, and mak- 
ing Britain queen of the industrial world and mistress 

1 Sartor y 82; Signs of the Times, 233; Chartisniy 130. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 53 

of the seas, — in all this splendid triumph of the 
British worker Carlyle could and did exult with his 
contemporaries. But he could not share in the un- 
clouded optimism of Macaulay and the middle-class 
Liberals. His sense of the glory of material expan- 
sion was disturbed by what he saw taking place in 
the very structure of society. More than all else the 
ever-increasing separation, economic and social, 
between the rich and the poor filled him with alarm. 
"Wealth has accumulated itself into masses,'* he said; 
"and Poverty, also in accumulation enough, lies 
impassibly separated from it; opposed, uncommuni- 
cating, like forces in positive and negative poles. The 
Gods of this lower world sit aloft on glittering thrones, 
less happy than Epicurus's gods, but as ignorant, as 
impotent; while the boundless living chaos of Ig- 
norance and Hunger welters terrific, in its dark fury, 
under their feet." Man has conquered the material 
forces of the world, but he reaps no profit from the 
victory. "Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of 
civilization, nine tenths of mankind have to struggle 
in the lowest battle of savage or even animal man, 
the battle against Famine. Countries are rich, pros- 
perous in all manner of increase, beyond example; 
but the Men of these countries are poor, needier than 
ever of all sustenance outward and inward. . . . The 
frightful condition of a Time, when public and private 
Principle, as the word was once understood, having 
gone out by sight, and Self-interest being left to plot, 
and struggle, and scramble, as it could and would, 
difficulties had accumulated till they were no longer 
to be borne, and the spirit that should have fronted 



54 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

and conquered them seemed to have forsaken the 
World; — when the Rich, as the utmost they could 
resolve on, had ceased to govern, and the Poor, in 
their fast accumulating numbers, and ever widening 
complexities, had ceased to be able to do without 
governing." ^ 

The many graphic pictures that Carlyle drew of 
the miserable poor leave the reader in no doubt as to 
the character of the impressions which their condi- 
tion made upon his mind. He was not a sentimental- 
ist; for a Hfetime he preached and practiced the 
gospel of labor as an antidote to sentimentalism. But 
his soul was stirred to its depths by what he saw and 
read. Dante's vision of Hell is not more intense and 
hardly more vivid. "When one reads," he said in a 
letter, "of the Lancashire Factories and little children 
labouring for sixteen hours a day, inhaling at every 
breath a quantity oi Jwm^ falling asleep over their 
wheels, and roused again by the lash of thongs over 
their backs, or the slap of * billy-rollers' over their 
little crowns, . . . one pauses with a kind of amazed 
horror, to ask if this be Earth, the place of Hope, or 
Tophet, where hope never comes!" ... "Do you 
remember," he asked in a letter to his wife, describing 
the Manchester Mills, "do you remember the poor 
'grinders' sitting underground in a damp dark place, 
some dozen of them? . . . Those poor fellows, in 
their paper caps with their roaring grindstones, and 
their yellow oriflammes of fire, all grinding themselves 
so quietly to death, will never go out of my memory." 
No less indelible was his memory of the Welsh miners. 
* Characteristics, 18-19 J Corn-Law Rhymes , 195. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 55 

"Such a set of unguided, hard- worked, fierce, and 
miserable-looking sons of Adam I never saw before. 
Ah me ! It is like a vision of Hell, and never will leave 
me, that of these poor creatures broiling, all in sweat 
and dirt, amid their furnaces, pits, and rolling mills." 
With incomparable literary skill, with the "light- 
ning's power to strike out marvellous pictures and 
reach to the inmost of men with a phrase," as George 
Meredith pithily says, Carlyle thus described the 
continents of squalid dwellings in the cities, — the 
crowds of gaunt and tattered Irish, swarming into the 
manufacturing towns and lowering the standards of 
life of the British workmen, — "the thirty-thousand 
distressed needle- women, — " the " half-a-million 
handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a day in 
perpetual inability to procure thereby enough of the 
coarsest food," — the two million paupers in crowded 
Bastilles, or workhouses, — and worst of all the moral 
degradation of these grimy and discontented masses. 
One or two masterly sketches of these wrecks of 
humanity, set adrift by the industrial upheaval, are 
too characteristic of Carlyle's spiritual reaction to be 
omitted. "Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives, in 
Huntingdonshire, on a bright day last autumn, I saw 
sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Bastille 
and within their ring-wall and its railings, some half- 
hundred or more of these men. Tall robust figures, 
young mostly or of middle age; of honest counten- 
ance, many of them thoughtful and even intelligent- 
looking men. They sat there, near by one another; 
but in a kind of torpor, especially in a silence, which 
was very striking. In silence: for, alas, what word was 



56 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

to be said? An Earth all lying round, crying, Come 
and till me, come and reap me, — yet we here sit en- 
chanted! In the eyes and brows of these men hung 
the gloomiest expression, not of anger, but of grief 
and shame and manifold inarticulate distress and 
weariness; they returned my glance with a glance that 
seemed to say *Do not look at us. We sit enchanted 
here, we know not why. The Sun shines and the Earth 
calls; and, by the governing Powers and Impotences 
of this England, we are forbidden to obey. It is im- 
possible, they tell us ! * There was something that re- 
minded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all this; and 
I rode swiftly away." Likewise for the operatives in 
Glasgow the time was out of joint, and the world was 
become not a home but a dingy prison-house: "Is it 
a green flowery world, with azure everlasting sky 
stretched over it, the work and government of a God; 
or a murky-simmering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, 
cotton-fuzz, gin-riot, wrath and toil, created by a 
demon? The sum of their wretchedness merited and 
unmerited welters, huge, dark, and baleful, like a 
Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin: 
Gin justly named the most authentic incarnation of 
the Infernal Principle in our times, too indisputable 
an incarnation; Gin the black throat into which 
wretchedness of every sort, consummating itself by 
calling on delirium to help it, whirls down; abdication 
of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, 
on the part of men whose lot of all others would re- 
quire thought and resolution; liquid Madness sold at 
ten-pence the quartern, all the products of which are 
and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 57 

and that only! If from this black unluminous un- 
heeded InfernOy and Prisonhouse of souls in pain, 
there do flash up from time to time, some dismal 
wide-spread glare of Chartism or the like, notable to 
ail, claiming remedy from all, — are we to regard it as 
more baleful than the quiet state, or rather as not so 
baleful?'* What was threatening among the lower 
orders as a result of these conditions the last sentence 
in the passage clearly indicates. It was revolt. 
"Revolt,'' says Carlyle, "sullen revengeful humor of 
revolt against the upper classes, decreasing respect 
for what their temporal superiors command, decreas- 
ing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is 
more and more the universal spirit of the lower 
classes. ... To whatever other griefs the lower 
classes labor under, this bitterest and sorest grief 
now superadds itself: the unendurable conviction 
that they are unfairly dealt with, that their lot in this 
world is not founded on right." ^ 

Even more intense than his sympathetic under- 
standing of the workers, if it were possible, was 
Carlyle's scorn of the idle and irresponsible rich, 
the new rich as well as the old landed artisocracy. 
The smug contentment and careless detachment 
of an upper class, piling up wealth with miraculous 
rapidity and spending it ostentatiously upon lux- 
uries and selfish pleasures, were, so utterly opposed 
to every article in his social and spiritual creed that 
his descripion of it at times seems rather a splutter 
of rage than rational speech. Readers who Have 

^Letters of Thomas Carlyle y 356; Froude, Life^ III, 351; ibid., IV, 44; 
Chartism, 130; Past and Present, 2; Chartism, 132, 136. 



58 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

followed him in this field will remember the ex- 
plosions of Sauerteig and Smelfungus against Mam- 
monism and Dilettantism, against the monsters of 
opulence and the bloated nabobs of the new era, — 
Plugson of Undershot, Bobus of Houndsditch, and 
others of their ilk. "Are these your Pattern Men?" 
he asks. "They are your lucky (or unlucky) Gam- 
blers swollen big, . . . Paltry Adventurers for 
most part; worthy of no worship. . . . Unfortunate 
creatures! You are fed, clothed, lodged as men 
never were before; every day in new variety of 
magnificence are you equipped and attended to. . . . 
Mount into your railways; whirl from place to place, 
at the rate of fifty, or if you like of five hundred 
miles an hour: you cannot escape from that inexor- 
able all-encircling ocean-moan of Ennui.'' ^ For 
the most part the older aristocracy, the landowners, 
held themselves loftily aloof from the new industrial- 
ism and its problems. "What do these highly 
beneficed individuals do to society for their wages ? " — 
asked Carlyle during his long quiet days of medita- 
tion at Craigenputtock: "Kill partridges," he 
answered. '^Can this last? No, by the soul that 
is in man it cannot, and will not, and shall not. . . . 
Eleven thousand souls in Paisley alone living on 
three half pence a day, and the governors of the 
land all busy shooting partridges!" ^ England thus 
seemed to Carlyle, in his savage-satirical mood, to 
be made up of two sects, the sect of the drudge and 
the sect of the dandy, — a division running through 

1 Latter-Day Pamphlets^ 223, 286. 

2 Froude, Life of Carlyle, II, 67; III, 243. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 59 

the entire structure of society and threatening it 
with dissolution. 

In the presence of such conditions, when great 
issues were at stake and when men must be brought 
back to first principles, he could not stand aloof, 
indifferent and silent. Various special interests had 
their voices and their organs, — the aristocracy, the 
radicals, the Corn-law agitators, the Poor-law 
reformers. But each group spoke for itself, and 
spoke one-sidedly or selfishly. "The dumb poor," 
said Carlyle, "have no voice; and must and will 
find a voice — other than Rick-burnings, Gunpowder, 
and Chartism!" It was not enough, moreover, to 
pile up parliamentary reports upon the condition 
of England, with facts and figures as to the pros- 
perity of the rich and the wretchedness of the poor. 
Statistics and special pleadings were well enough 
in their way — and Carlyle read them extensively, — 
" but it must be the utterance of principles, grounded 
on facts which all may see." Men must be led back 
once more to the eternal foundations of life, to the 
laws of God and Nature, to the dictates of justice, 
to the rights of the governed and the duties of the 
governors. The great solid heart of England must 
be awakened! Otherwise reports and statistics were 
as so much chaff before the wind. Carlyle occupied 
a fortunate position from which to speak to the 
conscience of his contemporaries with the voice 
of the prophet. He was free from the trammels of 
party, class, or sect, free to condemn any evil and 
to advocate any remedy; and he gloried in his 
freedom. "No King or Pontiff has any power over 



6o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

me. . . . There is nothing but my maker whom I 
call Master under this sky,'* he wrote to his sister 
in 1842, in words that accurately express his con- 
victions for any period of his life. It is true that at 
certain times and under certain circumstances he 
did cherish hopes that he might become identified 
with social problems and issues, in a practical way; 
as when in 1834 (a time of almost desperate uncer- 
tainty in his private fortunes), he would gladly have 
accepted from John Stuart Mill and Molesworth 
the editorship of the London Review; and in 1867, 
the year of the second reform bill, when he had 
some desire of starting an independent journal with 
Froude and Ruskin. Froude is indeed authority 
for the statement that Carlyle, after the publication 
of Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850, imagined that he 
might be invited by the government "to assist in 
carrying out some of the changes which he had there 
insisted on." ^ It was fortunate that these hopes 
came to nothing, and that he was left with his in- 
dependence. Carlyle called himself a Bedouin, and 
a Bedouin he remained to the end, unattached, 
unchartered, free to follow no will but his own, free 
to strike when and where he pleased. 

Even during the first period of his literary career, 
the period of the critical essays, he was drawn further 
and further into discussions of the state of society. 

^ Froude, Life of Carlyle, IV, 48. The suggestion, implied in the above 
statement, of Carlyle's holding public office reminds one of the offer to 
him of a clerkship by Basil Montagu, on his first London visit in 1824: 
"the faith of Montagu wishing me for his clerk; thinking the polar bear, 
reduced to a state of dyspeptic dejection, might safely be trusted tending 
rabbits." 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 6i 

He could not remain content to write reviews when 
he saw, as he said in Sartor^ "a world becoming dis- 
mantled.'* Poetry, literary criticism, art, and 
philosophy must give way to more pressing issues. 
'*How can we sing and paint^' he asks, "when we 
do not yet believe and see^' ^ "He thinks it the only 
question for wise men," reported Emerson, "instead 
of art and fine fancies and poetry and such things, 
to address themselves to the problems of society." ^ 
From 1830 onward Carlyle, in his essays, referred 
more and more to "our age." It would be possible 
indeed to regard all of the later and greater essays as 
tracts for the times, though to do this would be to 
lay emphasis upon certain aspects at the expense of 
others. In the Voltaire (1828) he declared against 
skepticism and denial; in the Diderot (1833) he 
warned his readers of mechanism and a mechanical 
age. Even in the Scott (1837), last of the critical 
essays, Carlyle wrote with his eye upon worldliness 
and a worldly era. On the other hand the essay on 
BoswelVs Life of Johnson (1832) was written partly 
for the purpose of setting before a drifting social 
order the figure of a man who held fast to integrity 
and duty; while in the second Goethe (1832) there was 
presented the true prophet and ideal character, — 
the builder who had wrought out for himself a com- 
plete life, in contrast to the halfness in the lives of 
men of Carlyle's own time. In the Signs of the Times 
(1829) and Characteristics (1832) the attack upon 
contemporary thought was more direct and open. 

1 Froude, Lije^ II, 299. 

2 Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketchesy 497. 



62 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

The monumental histories themselves, although 
built upon a solid foundation of documentary mate- 
rial, were inspired by a very definite social philosophy. 
The French Revolution (1837) set forth the frightful 
dangers that inevitably threatened a nation whose 
social order was founded upon class privilege and 
ancient injustice; while the Cromwell (1845) ^^^ the 
Frederick the Great (i 858-1 865) reflected Carlyle's 
stern conviction that the ship of state could not 
come through the storms that beat upon it, unless 
its course was directed by a great captain. The 
writing, however, in which, his social philosophy is 
most fully set forth and which form the basis of the 
present study are the following: Sartor Resartus 
(1831); Chartism (1839); Heroes and Hero-JVorship 
(1841); Past and Present (1843); Latter-Day Pamph- 
lets (1850); with which should be included Shooting 
Niagara (1867), a parting volley at advancing democ- 
racy. In these books it is not the political propa- 
gandist nor the partisan who speaks. It is not even 
mainly the advocate of special remedies, although 
very special remedies were urged, as will be shown 
in the next chapter. The voice heard oftenest is the 
voice of the moralist and seer, speaking directly to 
the hearts of Englishmen upon the plain facts of 
greedy wealth and grim poverty, and proclaiming 
with an assurance born out of fiery trial the authen- 
tic principles of justice and truth as the basis of a 
better social order. It was a voice that grew harsher 
with the passing of events, but to the last it never 
wavered from its conviction that there could be no 
other foundation of constitutions and creeds alike 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 63 

than the righteousness of the individual soul. It 
was this voice, says Froude, that came to the young 
generation of Englishmen like the sound of ten 
thousand trumpets, "amidst the controversies, the 
arguments, the doubts, the crowding uncertainties" 
of mid- Victorian England.^ 

Carlyle's criticism of his age starts with a profound 
dissent from its fundamental beliefs, and from the 
tendencies which, as he thought, sprang from them. 
That the times were sick and out of joint discerning 
thinkers could see for themselves. According to the 
great majority of these observers the cause of social 
disorders lay in bad social arrangements, and the 
cure in right arrangements. The panacea, in other 
words, was proper machinery ^ — a word that Carlyle 
caught up, in a time of enormous material expansion, 
and made use of as the symbol of his entire attack. 
The epoch, in its work, its ways, its thought and its 
ideal, was mechanical, — that was its primal eldest 
curse. There was a pervading belief in the outer, vis- 
ible, practical, and physical, a belief that the possibil- 
ity of reform and regeneration rested in statistics, 
workhouses, model prisons, acts of parliament, phil- 
anthropical and co-operative societies, organizations, 
constitutions, and thirty-nine articles alone. "Do 
you ask why misery abounds among us?" he inquired. 
"I bid you look into the notion we have formed for 
ourselves of this Universe, and of our duties and des- 
tinies there. . . . Faith, Fact, Performance in all 
high and gradually in all low departments, go about 
their business; Inanity well tailored and upholstered, 

1 Froude, Lije, III, 249. 



64 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

mild-spoken Ambiguity, decorous Hypocrisy which is 
astonished you should think it hypocritical, taking 
their room and drawing their wages: from zenith to 
nadir, you have Cant, Cant, — a Universe of Incredi- 
bilities which are not even credited, which each man 
at best only tries to persuade himself that he credits. 
Do you expect a divine battle, with noble victories, 
out of this?" ^ The reiterated cry of the prophet is 
familiar. Religion is waning, or gone; men have 
closed their eyes to the eternal Substance of things 
and opened them only to the Shows and Shams. 
They believe only in " a great unintelligible Perhaps." 
Their only hell is the hell of not succeeding — "a 
somewhat singular Hell." Faith in the vital, invisi- 
ble, infinite; faith in love, fear, wonder, enthusiasm; 
faith in the expression of these mystic forces through 
literature, art, and religion, has vanished from society, 
leaving it sick, introspective, and self-conscious. 
The vital has retreated before the mechanical. "A 
man's religion," Carlyle said, "consists not in the 
many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but . 
of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort { 
for believing." ^ But what is the religion of the aver- 
age Britisher? "He believes in the inalienable nature 
of purchased beef, in the duty of the British citizen to 
fight for himself when injured, and other similar 
faiths." ^ His faith is faith in stomach and purse, not 
in heart and head. He believes that happiness de- 
pends upon circumstances without, not upon spirit 
within; and he looks, if he looks at all, to political and 
economic adjustments for salvation. For his sacred 

^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, 252. ^ Ibid.^ 266. ' Ibid., 267. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 65 

"interests" must be preserved whatever else is lost. 
His gospel, therefore, is a gospel of Mammonism and 
dilettantism, — a very ancient religion! 

This materialistic faith found complete expression, 
according to Carlyle, in the current ethical and social 
philosophy of the time; in the utilitarianism of Ben- 
tham and his disciples, in the parliamentary radical- 
ism of this group and their followers, and in the blind 
dogmatism of the "Dismal Science," as Carlyle nick- 
named political economy. To the creeds of this 
school of thought he was opposed by every intuition 
of his nature. Its very shibboleths proved that its 
foundations were mechanistic: — "cause and effect," 
"profit and loss," "cash-payment," "competition," 
' laissez-faire^' "pleasure and pain," "self-interest," 
and all the rest of the labels attached by a generation 
of quacks to their nostrums, — as though the ills of a 
stricken society could be instantly cured by some 
"Morrison's Pill!" The corner-stone of this ma- 
chine-made philosophy was the "steam engine Utili- 
tarianism" of Bentham, which Carlyle regarded as 
the inevitable creed of an epoch of gigantic material 
growth; but which he none the less condemned as the 
negation of every principle by which the world must 
be reformed. For it identified virtue with self-inter- 
est; it made ethics into a system of checking and 
balancing by which the self-regarding accountant 
might extract a net surplus of pleasure as against 
pain; it insisted upon rights before duties, wages 
before obligations; it promoted the physical and 
finite ends of man at the expense of his spiritual 
nature, considering him a conipound of clashing de- 



66 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

sires and fears instead of a creature dependent upon a 
God whom he should reverence and obey. Carlyle 
was never weary of venting his scorn and anger upon 
men who hoped to regenerate society with such a 
creed. For a man to fancy himself, he said, " a dead 
Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on, 
was reserved for this latter era. There stands he, his 
Universe one huge Manger, filled with hay and this- 
tles to be weighed against each other; and looks long- 
eared enough." ^ Vitally linked with this individual- 
istic hedonism were the teachings of Mai thus and the 
doctrine of laissez-faire^ which drew down Carlyle's 
anathemas no less scornfully; for they, too, left the 
toiling masses without guidance, with ominous re- 
sults. "How often," he said, "have we read in Mal- 
thusian benefactp^ps of the species: 'The working 
people have their condition in their own hands; let 
them diminish the supply of laborers, and of course 
the demand and the remuneration will increase!* 
Yes, let them diminish the supply: but who are they? 
They are twenty-four millions of human individuals, 
scattered over a hundred and eighteen square miles 
of space and more; weaving, delving, hammering, 
joinering; each unknown to his neighbour; each dis- 
tinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of 
character that can take a resolution, and act on it, 
very readily. ... O, Wonderful Malthusian proph- 
ets! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must 
come one way or another: but will it be, think you, by 
twenty millions of working people . . . passing, in 
universal trade-union, a resolution not to beget any 

* Sartor Resartus, 152. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 67 

more till the labor-market become satisfactory?" 
A shade more rational would it be, continued Carlyle 
in acrid Swiftian vein, to supply a "Parish Extermi- 
nator, or Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public 
expense, free to all parishioners/' ^ To the same 
effect was his condemnation of laissez-faire^ which left 
the workers to scramble along as best they could: 
"Whoever in the press is trodden down, has only to 
lie there and be trampled,'* — a monstrous doctrine 
and an abrogation of every duty on the part of the 
governors of society. Carlyle's hostility to these and 
the allied tenets of the schools grew more vehement 
as he saw conditions on all sides becoming worse. He 
fulminated against a soft-hearted philanthropy that 
coddled criminals in model-prisons and left uncared 
for the needy and deserving. Your scoundrel, he 
declared, could not be reformed by applications of 
rose-water! He fulminated against parliamentary 
radicalism that debated eight years in a reformed 
parliament and left the English workingmen wringing 
their hands and breaking out into "five-point Chart- 
ism," amidst riots and hootings. He broke forth in 
anger, too, against a ceremonious officialism that 
heaped up mountains of red-tape and made a great 
fuss about smaller matters; while the "Condition of 
England Question" was left to take care of itself under 
the guidance of "enHghtened selfishness." Wher- 
ever Carlyle looked he saw a world in the grip of 
machinery. Mechanism had become the vampire of 
national life. 

The evil effects of this materialistic philosophy and 

^ChartisTity 183. 



68 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

political economy were to be seen everywhere. They 
were to be seen in bad leaders and in bad work. Most 
of all they were evident in the distressed and discon- 
tended workers. Much of Carlyle's severest condem- 
nation of the age was directed, as has already been 
pointed out, against the old aristocracy and the new. 
Both classes wantonly neglected the duties of leader- 
ship. By every sign of the times, therefore, they 
were doomed to extinction, unless they should speed- 
ily awaken to a sense of their responsibilities. "What 
shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the Owners of the 
Soil of England; whose recognized function is that of 
handsomely consuming the rents of England, shoot- 
ing the partridges of England, and as an agreeable 
amusement, diletantte-ing in Parliament and Quar- 
ter-Sessions for England? We will say mournfully, 
in the presence of Heaven and Earth, — that we stand 
speechless, stupent, and know not what to say! 
That a class of men entitled to live sumptuously on 
the marrow of the earth; permitted simply, nay 
entreated, and as yet entreated in vain, to do nothing 
at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the face 
of this Planet. That such a class is transitory, excep- 
tional, and, unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot 
continue. ... A High Class without duties to do is 
like a tree planted on precipices; from the roots of 
which all the earth has been crumbling.'' ^ The fat 
luxury and the grasping brutality of the British 
manufacturer on the other hand, — like Hudson, the 
railway King, who swindled poor people out of their 
savings and fared sumptuously upon plundered 

^ Past and Present^ 153, 154. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 69 

wealth, — these too must be transitory, if there were 
any justice in creation. Relations between an upper 
class such as this and the laboring classes were of 
necessity impersonal and mechanical. The old feudal "^ 
relations of master and servant on manor or in guild 
had given place to what Carlyle called the "nomadic 
principle** in servantship. Between employers and 
men, in modern industry, there was no permanence 
of tenure, no permanence of relation anywhere. 
Cash-payment was the sole nexus. The laborer 
worked during long hours under bad conditions for 
wages alone. He was a mechanical cog in a mechani- 
cal wheel, in a world of machinery! "We have pro- 
foundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is 
not the sole relation of human beings; we think, 
nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all 
engagements of man. *My starving workers.^* an- 
swers the rich mill-owner: 'Did not I hire them 
fairly in the market ? Did I not pay them, to the last 
sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I 
to do with them more?* " ^ The disastrous results of 
these unnatural relations were more and more evident 
in the soot and dirt and "squalid horror now defac- 
ing England,** and in what Carlyle condemned as 
"cheap and nasty** work, — universal shoddy in all 
departments of industry. "Do you know the shop, 
saleshop, workshop, industrial establishment tem- 
poral or spiritual, in broad England, where genuine 
work is to be had? ** — he asked. ^ How could there be 
a genuine product when the workman had no interest 
in his work and when the manufacturer, under the 

* Past and Presenti 126. ^ Shooting Niagara, 227. 



70 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

stress of competition, was only concerned in turning 
out ever cheaper and more showy articles for the 
trade? Under such conditions collapse of standards 
was inevitable.^ 

Bad as these things were, the growing discontent 
of the workers was infinitely worse. Without guid- 
ance from the upper classes, or from middle-class 
utilitarianism, and driven to desperation by their own 
worsening condition, they were beginning to demand 
political rights as their only hope and they were 
threatening to revolt if these rights were not forth- 
with granted. "The expectant millions," said Car- 
lyle, "have sat at a feast of the Barmecide; been 
bidden fill themselves with the imagination of meat. 
What thing has Radicalism obtained for them; what 
other than shadows of things has it so much as asked 
for them? Cheap Justice, Justice to Ireland, Irish 
Appropriation-Clause, Rate-Paying Clause, Poor- 
Rate, Church-Rate, Household Suffrage, Ballot- 
Question 'open' or shut: not things but shadows of 
things; Benthamee formulas; barren as the east- 
wind! An Ultra-Radical, not seemingly of the Ben- 
thamee species, is forced to exclaim : ' The people are 
at last wearied. They say. Why should we be ruined 

1 Cf. "A newly built house is more like a tent than a house; no Table 
that I fall in with here can stand on its legs; a pair of good Shoes is what 
I have not been able to procure for the last ten years." This was Carlyle's 
entry in his notebook for 22 October, 183 1, London. To this Professor 
Norton appends the following comment: "Even in later life Carlyle 
used to complain humorously that no tolerable shoes could be found in 
London, and to declare that his only pair of well-made shoes came from 
an old shoemaker in Dumfries, that he had worn them for years, 'had 
them upper-leathered and under-leathered,' and they would last a long 
while yet." {Two Note Booksy 206-7.) He wore clothing also made at 
home, because of his faith in Annandale cloth and Annandale tailors. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 71 

in our shops, thrown out of our farms, voting for 
these men? . . . It is not a light matter when the 
just man can recognize in the powers set over him no 
longer anything that is divine; when resistance 
against such becomes a deeper law of order than 
obedience to them; when the just man sees himself 
in the tragical position of a stirrer-up of strife! "^ 
The passage is significant, for it shows Carlyle's 
conception of the crisis towards which the drama of 
events must inevitably tend. The culminating 
phenomenon of the times, no less terrible than in- 
evitable, was rebellion, widespread rebellion of the 
masses against a crushing mechanism. And this 
phenomenon, this threatened outburst of sansculot- 
tism, Carlyle called democracy! 

To him as to many of his contemporaries the rise of 
democracy was the most momentous fact of the 
century. From year to year he watched its progress, 
at first not without sympathy and hope (he was in 
favor of Catholic emancipation and the first Reform 
Bill, and he looked upon extremes of wealth as un- 
just) ; 2 but as time went on his reaction changed to 
surprise and alarm, until democracy came to mean 
social and political ruin, and the negation of govern- 
ment. If the reader of Carlyle will call to mind the 
views expressed in the French Revolution (1837), then 
in Chartism (1839), ^^^^ ^^^ Present (1843), Latter- 

1 Chartism, 17 1-3. 

2 There are a good many evidences of a strong radicalism in Carlyle's 
earlier life: e. g. (1830) " Le classe la plus pauvre is evidently in the way 
of rising from its present deepest abasement: in time, it is likely, the 
world will be better divided, and he that has the toil of ploughing will 
have the first cut at the reaping." {Two Note Booksy 158.) 



72 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Bay Pamphlets (1850), and still later in Shooting 
Niagara (1867), together with the various opin- 
ions scattered up and down the published correspon- 
dence, he will have no difficulty to convince him- 
self of the truth of this statement. Carlyle dated 
modern democracy from the French Revolution. 
The day of the procession of notables at Versailles in 
1789 was "the baptism-day of democracy," as it was 
the "extreme unction day of Feudalism." From 
then onward, in the European revolutions of 1830 
and 1848, in the Chartist disturbances at home, and 
in the steady upward push of the lower classes every- 
where, he saw that the popular movement was 
"making rapid progress in these later times, and ever 
more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio." ^ Its 
progress was not only rapid, it was irresistible. "For 
universal Democracy, whatever we may think of 
it, has declared itself as an inevitable fact of the 
days in which we live. . . . The gods have ap- 
pointed it so; no Pitt, nor body of Pitts or mortal 
creatures can appoint it otherwise. Democracy sure 
enough, is here: one knows not how long it will keep 
hidden underground even in Russia; — and here in 
England, though we object to it absolutely in the 
form of street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, 
and decidedly will not open doors to it on those terms, 
the tramp of its million feet is on all streets and thor- 
oughfares, the sound of its bewildered thousandfold 
voice is in all thinkings and modes and activities of 
men. ^ 

What was the meaning of this inevitable move- 

^ Chartism, 145. ^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, 7-8. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 73 

ment? How was the mighty advancing tide of the 
proletariat to be understood? This was the supreme 
question. "The whole social wisdom of the Present 
Time is summoned, in the name of the Giver of 
Wisdom, to make clear to itself, and lay deeply to 
heart with an eye to strenuous valiant practice and 
effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of 
the European Populations, which calls itself Democ- 
racy, and decides to continue permanent, may be." ^ 
The answers that Carlyle made to this question 
have often been misunderstood. And with reason, 
since his opinions not infrequently must seem con- 
tradictory even to the devoted Carlylean; while 
by more than one casual or unfriendly reader they 
have been looked upon as hardly more than a jumble 
of ejaculations or inarticulate shrieks of despair. 

Certain of Carlyle*s social interpretations are 
wholly in the spirit of democracy. He believed in 
the worth of the individual, without regard to rank, 
creed, or capacity. Peasant-born himself, working 
his way to distinction from the humblest circum- 
stances, he had good reason to disregard outer 
conditions in his estimates of men. His father, a 
stone mason of Ecclefechan, was to Carlyle a re- 
vered example of the wisdom and worth that may 
go with the lowliest duties. Burns and Johnson, 
two of his best loved literary heroes, taught him 
(if he needed to be taught) that genius could create 
an orbit for itself, regardless of the opinions of the 
Hterati. Sartor Resartus^ his first book of importance, 
rings with the message that man is man, a child of 

^ Latter-Day Pamphlets, 8. 



74 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

God, whether he be king, priest, poet, or toilworn 
craftsman. To the discerning eyes of Teufelsdrockh 
"the star of a Lord is little less and little more than 
the broad button of Birmingham spelter in a clown's 
smock. . . . Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's 
son that knew, were it never so rudely, there was a 
God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only 
knew there were two-and-thirty quarters on the 
family-coach?" ^ Because of such democratic opin- 
ions Carlyle called himself in 1831 a speculative 
radical. He habitually cut through rank and cir- 
cumstances to the human being underneath. Like 
a poet, like another Burns, his soul was profoundly 
stirred by the thought of man the worker, man the 
sufferer, bearing within his nature mystic potentiali- 
ties for better things. In such a mood, people were to 
him anything but an indiscriminate herd. "Masses 
indeed: — " he says in French Revolution^ "every 
unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands 
covered there with his own skin, and if you prick 
him he will bleed. . . . Every unit of these masses 
is a miraculous Man, even as thou thyself art; 
struggling, with vision or with blindness, for his 
infinite Kingdom (this life which he has got, once 
only, in the middle of_ Eternities) ; with a spark of 
the Divinity, what thou callest an immortal soul, 
in him!" 2 To these unawakened units Carlyle 
would give education as the one thing needful: 
"The poor is hungry and athirst; but for him also 
there is food and drink: he is heavy-laden and weary; 
but for him also the Heavens send Sleep, and of the 

1 Sartor Resartusy 19, 68. ^ French Revolution^ I, 30. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 75 

deepest; in his smoky cribs, a clear dewy heaven of 
Rest envelopes him, and fitful glitterings of cloud- 
skirted Dreams. But what I do mourn over is, that 
the lamp of his soul should go out; that no ray of 
heavenly, or even of earthly knowledge, should visit 
him; but only, in the haggard darkness, like two 
spectres, Fear and Indigestion bear him company. 
Alas, while the Body stands so broad and brawny, 
must the Soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost 
annihilated! Alas, was this too a Breath of God; 
bestowed in Heaven, but on earth never to be un- 
folded! — That there should one Man die ignorant 
who had capacity for Knowledge, this I call a tragedy, 
were it to happen more than twenty times in the 
minute, as by some computations it does. The mis- 
erable fraction of Science which our united Man- 
kind, in a wide Universe of Nescience, has ac- 
quired, why is not this, with all diligence, imparted 
to all?"i Such passages contain the very essence 
of democratic doctrine, — faith in the worth of the 
individual irrespective of rank and in the power of 
education to awaken and develop that worth ! 

Carlyle's democracy goes even further. He was a 
vigorous and life-long champion of three great 
principles which underlie modern progress and 
which were established only after prolonged popular 
struggle; — the right of private judgment as won by 
the Protestant Reformation, the right of a people 
to revolt against prolonged oppression, and the 
right of the tools to him who can use them, — the 
last two rights being the fruit of the French Revolu- 

1 Sartor Resartus, 158. 



76 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

tion. Protestantism, of which Martin Luther was 
the evangel, "was a revolt against spiritual sover- 
eignties, Popes and much else," by which liberty 
of private judgment in spiritual affairs was enthroned 
among mankind; and, as such. Protestantism was 
"the grand root from which our whole subsequent 
European History branches out, . . . and the be- 
ginning of new genuine sovereignty and order.'' ^ 
If the Reformation was for Carlyle the first act in 
the struggle for freedom, the French Revolution was 
the last, without which, he often declared, he could 
not have understood the modern world. The most 
memorable event "for a thousand years," it re- 
vealed to him facts of profoundest significance con- 
cerning democracy. It taught him that the people, 
the canaille^ may be trusted to rise up against im- 
memorial privilege, and that position and power 
belong not to a worn-out feudal aristocracy but, 
regardless of rank, to those who can use them for 
the good of the state. No extremest or leveler in 
any age could have been more contemptuous than 
was Carlyle towards the futile pomp and circum- 
stance of ineffectual kingship. "Strip your Louis 
Quatorze of his King-gear," he said, "and there is 
left nothing but a poor forked radish with a head 
fantastically carved. ... To assert that in what- 
ever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the 

1 Heroes and Hero-Worshipyii^. Carlyle's recognition of the effects of 
the Reformation in establishing an era of private judgment is weakened 
by his attempt to explain that "liberty of private judgment must at all 
times have existed in the world." Strong men like Dante, he says, must 
always have followed their faith! Followed it, yes, but with what 
'liberty'? Was there 'Hberty' of private judgment for Galileo, Huss, or 
Tyndale? 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET ^y 

other plan of clutching at him); and clapt a round 
piece of metal on the head of, and called king, — 
there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so 
that he became a kind of god, and a divinity inspired 
him with faculty and right to rule over you to all 
lengths: this, — what can we do with this but leave 
it to rot silently in the Public Libraries?" ^ If the 
gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering 
thrones, indolent and indifferent, while ignorant 
and hungry humanity welters uncared for at their 
feet, then the time must come when sansculottism 
shall burst up from beneath and sweep away gods 
and thrones alike, leaving their places cleared for 
the institution of real government and real leaders. 
Such is one of the Carlylean interpretations of the 
French Revolution. It was exactly this kind of 
portentous phenomenon which Carlyle saw threaten- 
ing to return again, in the revolutions of 1830 and 
1848, in the Chartist outbreaks, and in the Paris 
revolution of 1871. Concerning this latest outbreak 
of the populace he wrote to his brother: "One thing 
I can see in these murderous ragings by the poorest 
classes in Paris, that they are a tremendous proc- 
lamation to the upper classes in all countries: 
'Our condition, after eighty-two years of struggling, 
O ye quack upper classes, is still unimproved; more 
intolerable from year to year, and from revolution 
to revolution; and by the Eternal Powers, if you 
cannot mend it, we will blow up the world, along 
with ourselves and you. ' " ^ The other principle 

1 Heroes and Hero-Worship, 170, 183. ^ 

2 Froude, Life of Carlyle, IV, 346. 



78 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

of modern democracy — the principle that the able 
man does not belong exclusively to one rank but 
may be found in any — was first victoriously pro- 
claimed by Napoleon, who, said Carlyle, "in the 
first period, was a true democrat. . . . The man 
was a Divine Missionary though unconscious of it; 
and preached, through the cannon's throat, that great 
doctrine. La carrier e ouverte aux talens (The Tools 
to him that can handle them), which is our ultimate 
Political Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie." ^ It 
cannot be doubted, therefore, that Carlyle found 
in sansculottism an indestructible right meaning, a 
soul of truth which must live and work itself out 
through the vicissitudes of time; — "till, in some 
perfected shape, it embrace the whole circuit of the 
world! For the wise may now everywhere discern 
that he must found on his manhood, not on the 
garnitures of his manhood." ^ It was this truth which 
Burns had made immortal in the lines: 

" The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that," 

and which was to be taken up as the battle-cry of 
the new democracy. 

Why, then, was Carlyle a foe of the popular move-v 
ment? Why did he look upon sansculottism, or the 
revolt of outraged masses, as an ebullition of bedlam? 
How came he to believe that all the evils of his age, 
social, industrial, political, were summed up in the 
word democracy? For he, no less than Wordsworth 
(the Wordsworth of 1820 and after), looked upon 

1 '^Heroes and Hero-Worshipy 220; Sartor Resartusy 123. 
^^ French Revolution, III, 264. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 79 

advancing democracy as upon a rising flood that 
threatened to sweep away the ancient landmarks and 
leave society in helpless confusion. The career must 
be open to the talents, yes, and every man should be 
free to become all that he was created capable of 
becoming, — to so much of the democratic creed he 
attached his undying faith. But this gifted son of an 
Annandale peasant had no faith in the capacity of the 
average man for independent collective action, 
whether industrial or political, — at least as he saw the 
average man in his own time. Hence his life-long 
opposition to the new movement. The individuals 
that made up the populations of the rising industrial 
centers were so many ignorant and servile units, 
without self-control and without vision, born to 
follow the guidance of wise leaders. Carlyle's creed 
with respect to the masses is graphically set forth in a 
characteristic passage from his essay on BoswelVs Life 
of Johnson: "Mankind sail their life- voyage in huge 
fleets, following some single whale-fishing or herring- 
fishing Commodore : the log-book of each differs not, 
in essential purport, from that of any other: nay the 
most have no legible log-book (reflection, observation 
not being among their talents); keep no reckoning, 
only keep in sight of the flagship, — and fish. . . . Or, 
the servile imitancy^ and yet also a nobler relationship 
and mysterious union to one another which lies in 
such imitancy, of Mankind might be illustrated under 
the different figure, itself nowise original^ of a Flock 
of Sheep. Sheep go in flocks for three reasons: First, 
because they are of a gregarious temper, and love to be 
together: Secondly, because of their cowardice; they 



8o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

are afraid to be left alone : Thirdly, because the com- 
mon run of them are dull of sight, to a proverb, and 
can have no choice in roads; sheep can in fact see 
nothing; in a celestial Luminary, and a scoured pew- 
ter Tankard, would discern only that both dazzled 
them, and were of unspeakable glory. How like their 
fellow-creatures of the human species! Men too, 
as was from the first maintained here, are gregarious; 
then surely faint-hearted enough, trembling to be left 
by themselves; above all, dull-sighted, down to the 
verge of utter blindness. Thus are we seen ever 
running in torrents, and mobs, if we run at all; and 
after what foolish scoured Tankards, mistaking them 
for Suns! Foolish Turnip-lanterns likewise, to all 
appearance supernatural, keep whole nations quak- 
ing, their hair on end. Neither know we, except by 
blind habit, where the good pastures lie: solely when 
the sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, 
and chew it; also when grass is bitter and scant, we 
know it, — and bleat and butt: these last two facts we 
know of a truth and in very deed. Thus do Men and 
Sheep play their parts on this Nether Earth; wander- 
ing restlessly in large masses, they know not whither; 
for most part, each following his neighbour, and his 
own nose." ^ Over and over again, with increasing 
fierceness as he grew older and often in Brobding- 
nagian breadth of phrase, he returned to the charge 
that the people were greedy blockheads, gullible and 
bribeable, wholly incapable of anything but "beer 
and balderdash," unless wisely directed by their 
superiors, the Bell- weathers ! "The poison of them," 

^ Essay sy IV, 88. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 8i 

he said, "is not intellectual dimness chiefly, but 
torpid un veracity of heart: not mistake of road, but 
want of pious earnestness in seeking your road. 
Insincerity, unfaithfulness, impiety: — careless tum- 
bling and buzzing about, in blind, noisy, pleasantly 
companionable 'swarms,' instead of solitary question- 
ing of yourself and of the Silent Oracles, which is a 
sad, sore and painful duty, though a much incumbent 
one upon a man. . . . Certain it is, there is nothing 
but vulgarity in our People's expectations, resolu- 
tions, or desires, in this Epoch. It is all a peaceable 
mouldering or tumbling down from mere rottenness 
and decay; whether slowly mouldering or rapidly 
tumbling, there will be nothing found of real or true 
in the rubbish-heap, but a most true desire of mak- 
ing money easily, and of eating it pleasantly." ^ Al- 
though some of Carlyle's explosions were repented of 
in the silences of old age, they suggest even better 
than less splenetic outbursts the depth of his distrust 
of the people: as for example his well-known descrip- 
tion of Americans as "eighteen millions of the greatest 
bores ever seen in this world before"; and the hardly 
less familiar characterization of his own country- 
men as "twenty-seven millions mostly fools." ^ 
Such were the creatures, so thought the prophet in 
his ultra-atrabiliar moods, whom all our yesterdays 
have lighted the way to dusty death. 

Amidst these stupid millions, called the populace 
or the mob, there smouldered the dreadful fire of 
rebellion, useful enough on occasions when it should 
flare up and consume histrionic kings, immemorial 

1 Essays, VII, 223, 216. 2 hatter-Day Pamphlets, 18, 177. 



82 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

privilege, and centenarian abuses, as it did in the 
French Revolution. But how if the power which 
dethroned Kings should end by enthroning itself? 
How if the "multitudinous canaille'* were to follow 
the beheading of Louis XVI with the Terror? The 
Reign of Terror, in fact, was to Carlyle a perfect 
symbol of democracy triumphant, — "Dominant Sans- 
culottism," he called it. Referring to the September 
Massacres and the work of the National Convention 
which declared France a republic, he said: "France 
has looked upon Democracy; seen it face to face. . . . 
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: not vestures, but the 
wish for vestures! The Nation is for the present, 
figuratively speaking, naked; it has no rule or vesture; 
but is naked, — a Sanscullotic Nation." ^ Democracy, 
then, was revolt trying to govern. The result was 
anarchy. This was the lesson which Carlyle learned 
from the French Revolution and by which he inter- 
preted the popular uprisings throughout his century. 
Repeatedly he likened the mob outbursts of Chartism, 
as well as later disturbances, to the Parisian mobs in 
revolutionary days. " Democracy," he wrote in 1 867, 
" the gradual uprise, and rule in all things, of roaring, 
million-headed, unreflecting, darkly suffering, darkly 
sinning * Demos,* come to call its old superiors to 
account, at its maddest of tribunals." ^ "We are," 
he said in his Edinburgh University rectorial address, 
which may be taken as his farewell utterance to the 
British public, "we are in an epoch of anarchy." ^ 
This address was delivered during the agitation pre- 

* French Revolution, III, 57, 58. ^ Reminiscences y II, 271. 

* Essays, VII, 194. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 83 

ceding the reform bill of 1867, which proposed a 
further extension of the suffrage and which therefore 
meant to Carlyle fresh floods of sanscullotism. And 
democracy meant to him not only a method of rebel- 
lion, a consummation of no government and laissez- 
faire; it meant also the despair of finding any leaders 
to guide men. In casting out false leaders it cast out 
also belief in leadership and fostered the horrible 
delusion that men could do without guidance. The 
freedom which democracy substituted was freedom 
to the appetites of base men, who would henceforth 
run their course "in the career of the cheap and 
nasty." Worse still, democracy was the throwing off 
of all right relations between man and man, keeping 
society down to the basis of cash-nexus and laissez- 
faire. "Certainly the notion everywhere prevails 
among us too," said Carlyle, "and preaches itself 
abroad in every cjialect, uncontradicted anywhere so 
far as I can hear, that the grand panacea for social 
woes is what we call 'enfranchisement,* * Emancipa- 
tion*; or, translated into practical language, the 
cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they 
are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally 
the case at the rate we have been going for some gen- 
erations past. Let us all be *free' of one another; we 
shall then be happy. Free, without bond or connec- 
tion except that of cash-payment; fair day's wage for 
the fair day's work; bargained for by voluntary con- 
tract, and law of supply-and-demand: this is thought 
to be the true solution of all difficulties and injustices 
that have occurred between man and man." ^ 

^Latter-Day Pamphlets ^ 2i. 



84 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Carlyle^s disbelief in democracy thus carried with 
it a disbelief in the machinery of democracy, — the 
franchise and the ballot, — together with a growing 
distrust in the capacity of even limited representa- 
tive assemblies to transact business. His deliberate 
opinion is well summarized by Froude, who says: 
"Under any conceivable franchise the persons chosen 
would represent the level of character and intelligence 
in those who chose them, neither more nor less, and 
therefore the lower the general average the worse the 
government would be." ^ Universal suffrage would 
place political power into the hands of the majority; 
and if the majority were stupid and debased, your 
result would not be government but anarchy. The 
ballot for all, therefore, was to Carlyle a perfect 
consummation of political evil. It gave liberty to 
bad men to inflict their badness upon society; it sub- 
jected wisdom to folly; it reduced all men to '* equal- 
ity,'' making " the vote of a Demerara Nigger equal 
and no more to that of a chancellor Bacon," and 
"Judas Iscariot to Jesus Christ." ^ The majority 
were foolish small men and they would never choose 
above their own heads. "There are such things as 
multitudes all full of beer and nonsense, even of in- 
sincere factitious nonsense, who by hypothesis cannot 
but be wrong. . . . Your Lordship, there are fools, 
cowards, knaves, and gluttonous traitors true only to 
their own appetite, in immense majority, in every 
rank of life; and there is nothing frightfuler than to 
see these voting and deciding. . . . No people or 
populace, with never such ballot-boxes, can select 

1 Froude, Life of Carlyle, IV, 296. ^ Essays, VII, 91, 203. 



SANSCULOTTISM AND ITS PROPHET 85 

such man for you {i. e.y a true leader) ; only the man of 
worth can recognize worth in man; — to the common- 
place man of no or of little worth, you, unless you 
wish to be misled, need not apply on such an occasion. 
Those poor Tenpound Franchisers of yours, they are 
not even in earnest; the poor sniffing, sniggering 
Honourable Gentlemen they send to Parliament are 
as little so. . . . I can tell you a million blockheads 
looking authoritatively into one man of what you call 
Genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but non- 
sense out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and 
defects, if they look till the end of time." ^ Carlyle 
regarded the parliaments of his day as representing 
not the collective wisdom of the nation, but its con- 
densed folly. He had no antagonism to the ballot if 
exercised by loyal, genuine men; but "if of ten men 
nine are recognizable as fools, which is a common 
calculation, how, in the name of wonder, will you ever 
get a ballot-box to grind you out a wisdom from the 
votes of these ten men?" ^ 

Democracy, therefore, or the rule of undisciplined 
masses, must inevitably lead to the rule of the auto- 
crat, whether benevolent or despotic; since anarchy 
is a self-canceling business. Cromwell had to order 
the Rump Parliament to quit, and Napoleon had to 
quell the Parisian mobs with a whiff of grapeshot. 
"More tolerable is the drilled Bayonet-rank," said 
Carlyle, " than the undrilled Guillotine. . . . While 
man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the 
necessary finish for a Sansculottism." ^ 

^Latter-Day Pamphlets, 206, 120. ^ Ibid., 202. 

^ French Revolution, III, 244; Heroes, 188. 



CHAPTER III 
THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 

"A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are 
cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately 
cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a 
jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. . . . No 
Working World, any more than a Fighting World, can be 
led on without a noble Chivalry of Work, and laws and 
fixed rules which follow out of that, — far nobler than any 
Chivalry of Fighting was." — Carlyle. 

In spite of his sweeping denunciations of sanscul- 
ottic radicalism, Carlyle knew that there was more, 
far more, in the popular uprisings of his time than 
mere rebellion against false gods. He had vision keen 
enough to see in the democratic movement not only 
a determined revolt against leaders that were false, 
but an effort, albeit blind and groping, to discover 
leaders that were true. So understood, democracy 
had in it a ray of hope, even though centuries of con- 
fusion might pass before the promise should be real- 
ized. "But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well 
shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: 
That of finding government by your Real-Superiors ! 
Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, 
benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, God-forget- 
ting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for cen- 
turies; to be taught us by tribulation, confusions; 
insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by con- 
flagration and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all 

86 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 87 

other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn. . . . 
Cannot one discern, too, across all democratic tur- 
bulence, clattering of ballot-boxes and infinite sorrow- 
ful jangle, needful or not, that this at bottom is the 
wish and prayer of all human hearts, everywhere and 
at all times: 'Give me a leader; a true leader, not a 
false sham-leader; a true leader, that he may guide me 
on the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that I 
may swear fealty to him and follow him, and feel 
that it is well with me/ ... All that Democracy 
ever meant lies there: the attainment of a truer and 
truer Aristocracy ^ or government again by the BestT ^ 
The tragic mistake of democracy was that it taught 
people to believe that the end of government could be 
secured by the ballot alone and by other mere politi- 
cal and economic arrangements such as parliamen- 
tary speeches, causes, debatings, universal hip-hip- 
hurrahing, oceans of beer and balderdash, copiously 
supplemented with laws, statistics, reports, and co- 
operative societies. Could the ballot ever raise the 
best to places of control, so long as it was exercised by 
a dim-eyed greedy multitude who always voted for 
their kind? Your dull clod-pole and your haughty 
featherhead alike must be made to discern and re- 
spect talent before they will raise it to positions of 
leadership. It takes a man of worth to recognize 
worth in men. "It is the noble People that makes 
the noble Government." Accordingly, to Carlyle, 
political reform as a panacea, or a Morrison*s Pill, 
for the social evils of the times was futile unless 

'^Past and Present^ 189 {cj. ibid., 215); Chartism, 146 {cf. Latter-Day 
Pamphlets, 92); Latter-Day Pamphlets, 102. 



88 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

founded upon moral reform. The ancient mischief 
was not that men could not vote^ but that they were 
weak, foolish, and sinful. Social evils arose from a 
debased social order, and a debased social order was 
only another way of saying that men as individuals 
were self-centered and evil. "We may depend upon 
it," said Carlyle characteristically, "where there is a 
Pauper, there is sin; to make one Pauper there go 
many sins. Pauperism is our Social Sin grown mani- 
fest." ^ Moral reform, therefore, should precede polit- 
ical reform, and moral reform must begin with the 
individual. Here was the rock upon which the new 
order must be built. 

It is not too much to say that the central aim of 
Carlyle's life-work, into the accomplishments of 
which he threw the weight of all his great powers, was 
to save man (of whatever class or station) from the 
crushing effects of industrialism by restoring to him 
faith in his humanity; and thus to create through him 
and his fellows a new society resting upon humane 
relations. To mechanics he opposed dynamics. To 
the logical, calculating, scientific, severely rational- 
istic temper, he opposed the mystical, spontaneous, 
poetic, and imaginative temper. He pleaded for per- 
sonal inner freedom, for a spirit of reverence, for a 
reawakening of faith in the inarticulate, unfathom- 
able forces of the soul. He pleaded for a renewal in 
man of his ancestral sense of wonder in the common 
things of life, since the truly supernatural is forever 
the natural. He wished to see men rediscover the 
wisdom and heroic worth of their forefathers, the 

* Latter-Day Pamphlets y 134. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 89 

generations of workers who builded better than they 
knew. Most of all, like a prophet of Israel, he called 
upon his contemporaries to re-enthrone righteousness 
and justice in their hearts as the source of every 
energy which could permanently recreate the world 
in which they lived. No less passionately than 
Wordsworth, Carlyle believed that the "high in- 
stincts" in human nature must be kept alive, if man 
is to survive the extraordinary risks of an indus- 
trial age. He recognized the value of machinery as 
frankly as did Arnold, but he saw just as clearly its 
dangers to the moral interests of man. "It seems 
clear enough," he said, "that only in the right co- 
ordination of the two, and the vigorous forwarding of 
hoth^ does our true line of action lie. Undue cultiva- 
tion of the inward or Dynamical province leads to 
idle, visionary, impracticable courses, and, especially 
in rude eras, to Superstition and Fanaticism, with 
their long train of baleful and well-known evils. 
Undue cultivation of the outward, again, though less 
immediately prejudiced, and even for the time pro- 
ductive of many palpable benefits, must, in the 
long-run, by destroying Moral Force, which is the 
parent of all other Force, prove not less certainly, and 
perhaps still more hopelessly, pernicious. This, we 
take it, is the grand characteristic of our age. By our 
skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the 
management of external things we excel all other 
ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral 
nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are 
perhaps inferior to most civilised ages." ^ 

^ Signs oj the Times y 245. 



90 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Carlyle's starting-point, then, for the solution of 
the complex problems of society is characteristically 
direct and simple. "All Reform except a moral one 
will prove unavailing. ... To reform a world, to 
reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all 
but foolish men know that the pnly solid, though a 
far slower, reformation, is what each begins and per- 
fects on himself. . . . We demand arrestment of the 
knaves and dastards, and begin by arresting our own 
poor selves out of that fraternity. There is no other 
reform conceivable. Thou and I, my friend, can, in 
the most flunky world, make, each of us, one non- 
flunky, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to 
begin with." ^ An ancient and familiar remedy for 
the diseases of a modern age! But Carlyle found no 
other and needed no other. Statistics, laws, organi- 
zations, mountains of red tape, were as nothing if 
the individual were not transformed from the heart 
outward. "It is the heart always that sees," he said, 
" before the head can see." ^ He had measureless con- 
fidence in the moral instincts which he believed to be 
potential if not active in every healthy nature, and 
he sought to arouse these instincts in man and to 
inspire him to act upon them. The world, he thought, 
needed nothing so much as good men, mystic creative 
centers of virtue; each of whom should play his part 
in the social drama, and so help to bring it nearer to 
perfection. 

It is important to note, however, that there was 
nothing parochial in Carlyle's conception of moral- 

1 Corn-Law Rhymes y 205; Signs of the Times ^ 252; Past and Present^ 31. 
^Chartism, 135. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 91 

ity. To him man's moral life was the source alike of 
man's proper relations with the world and with God. 
When he said that "all talent, all intellect (was) in 
the first place moral," and that "a thoroughly im- 
moral man could not know anything at all," he 
meant that the condition of getting knowledge, as of 
all genuinely fruitful activity, was a right desire to 
know. 1 The mind must reach out towards truth 
positively, co-operatively, so to speak, — and this 
mental attitude is moral. "To know a thing," he 
said, "what we can call knowing, a man must first 
love the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be virtu- 
ously related to it. If he have not the justice to put 
down his own selfishness at every turn, how shall he 
know? His virtues, all of them, will lie recorded in 
his knowledge. Nature, with her truth, remains to 
the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever 
a sealed book." 2 In thus making man's insight, 
intellectual as well as moral, depend upon a right 
state of the heart, Carlyle was at one with Ruskin, 
who compressed the whole doctrine into a single 
golden sentence: "The entire object of true education 
is to make people not merely do the right things, but 
enjoy the right things: not merely industrious, but 
to love industry — not merely learned, but to love 
knowledge — not merely pure, but to love purity — 
not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after 
justice." ^ 

Morality is thus the basis of man's social relations. 

1 Chartismy 135; Heroes and Hero-Worships 99. 

2 Heroes and Hero-Worships 99. Cf. ibid.y 41 

3 The Crown of Wild Olive, Works, XVIII, 435. 



92 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

It is likewise the basis of his rehgion. Immediate 
contact with God through the conscience, — this was 
the deepest fact that Carlyle professed to know con- 
cerning the nature of man. As a transcendentalist 
he habitually interpreted the outer world, the Not- 
Mey as phenomenal only, a daily manifestation of the 
spiritual in the material and common. But revela- 
tion of the Over-Soul through nature, however mi- 
raculous, was secondary and mediate; revelation 
through the conscience was primary and immediate. 
■^ "He who traces nothing of God in his own soul, will 
never find God in the world of matter — mere circlings 
of force there, of iron regulation, of universal death 
and merciless indifferency." ^ The true Shekinah is 
man. He is the oracle of the unseen. Upon his heart 
are written the laws of the Eternal more legibly than 
upon stones, or even upon creeds and sacred books. 
"Except thy own eye have got to see it, except thy 
own soul have victoriously struggled to clear vision 
and belief of it, what is the thing seen and the thing 
believed by another or by never so many others?" 
Carlyle was thus strictly Hebraic. He believed that 
the secret of the Lord was with them that feared Him 
and that only the upright should behold His face. 
God did not manifest himself in images and rituals, 
but in the *^I ought" of each soul, a mystic impulse, 
voiceless, formless, but "certain as Life, certain as 
Death. . . . Such knowledge, the crown of his 
whole spiritual being, the life of his life, let him keep 
and sacredly walk by. He has a religion." ^ 
The reformation of the individual was thus to be 

j * Froude, Life, IV, 329. 2 p^st and Present, 197. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 93 

achieved through his obedience to the first intima- 
tions of duty; for only so could man get his initial 
push in the right direction. " ^Do the Duty which lies 
nearest thee^ which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy 
second Duty will already have become clearer. . . . 
This day thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest 
in thy mind ten things which should be done, for one 
that thou doest! Bo one of them; this of itself will 
show thee ten others which can and shall be done." ^ 
Self-realization, which is the aim of life, depends 
therefore upon action, upon work, and the call to 
duty becomes a gospel of labor, the corner-stone of 
Carlyle's social philosophy. 

It is the worker who possesses the secret of life. 
Work is the one sure means of escape from unhappi- 
ness, from unbelief in self, from endless labyrinths of 
speculation. It is the pathway to a true knowledge 
of self, of the world, and of the eternal verities. From 
work done in obedience to duty springs faith, the 
faith that naturally grows up in a spirit that has 
lived both much and wisely. Through his work man 
advances step by step upon the kingdoms of darkness 
within and without, and creates good from evil, order 
from disorder. Each worker in his degree is a poet, 
discovering the ideal in the actual, and like the poet 
bodying forth the forms of things unseen and out of 
the flux fashioning the one thing that matters, a life, a 
bit of art, or a task faithfully done.^ And so the worker 

1 Sartor Resartusy 135; Past and Presenty 199. 

2 Many of Carlyle's best and most characteristic sayings are on work, 
as for examples: "He that has done nothing has known nothing. . . . 
The authentic insight and experience of any human being, were it but 
insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real 



94 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

becomes a hero; for does not his toil, whether it be 
the toil of artist or of humblest craftsman, task all the 
capacity, all the loyalty, all the courage of his nature? 
He is therefore the indispensable beginning in the 
grand work of social reform, since through reform of 
self he has become qualified to discern worth and 
leadership in his fellow men. He has acquired an eye 
for talent; and he who sees talent must of necessity 
reverence it. He who is himself heroic may be trusted 
to choose heroes to govern him. Carlyle had no fear 
of a world made up of workers. In their hands 
ballots, elections, parliaments, "bills and methods,'' 
all the machinery of government, against which 
(when he thought of twenty millions, mostly fools and 
idlers) he raged so vehemently, were safe. "Given 
the men a People choose, the People itself, in Its 
exact worth and worthlessness, is given. A heroic 
people chooses heroes, and is happy; a valet or flunky 
people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, 
thinking them heroes, and is not happy. The grand 

knowledge, a real possession and acquirement, how small soever. . . . 
It is more honorable to have built a dog-hutch than to have dreamed 
of building a palace. . . . Doubt as we will, man is actually Here; not 
to ask questions, but to work. . . . Between vague wavering Capability 
and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference! .... Our Works 
are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. . . . 
Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; 
the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to 
truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth. , . . 
A small Poet every worker is. . . . Whatso we have done, is done, and 
for us annihilated, and ever must we go and do anew. . . . Not what 
I Have, but what I Do is my Kingdom. ... No faithful workman 
finds his task a pastime. ... All work of man is as the swimmers: a 
waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will 
keep its word. ... Ye know at least this, That the mandate of God to 
His creature man is: Work!" 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 95 

summary of a man's spiritual condition, what brings 
out all his herohood and insight, or all his flunkyhood 
and horn-eyed dimness, is this question put to him. 
What man dost thou honour? Which is thy ideal of a 
man; or nearest that? So too of a People: for a 
People too, every People, speaks its choice, — were it 
only by silently obeying, and not revolting, — in the 
course of a century or so. Nor are electoral methods. 
Reform Bills and such like, unimportant." ^ Once we 
are a nation of workers, he declared, "By Reform 
Bills, Aati Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills 
and methods, we will demand of our Governors, with 
emphasis, and for the first time not without effect, 
that they cease to be quacks, or else depart; that they 
set no quackeries and blockheadisms anywhere to 
rule over us, that they utter or act no cant to us, — it 
will be better if they do not. For we shall now know 
quacks when we see them; cant, when we hear it, 
shall be horrible to us!'* ^ 

The workers, then, shall choose the leaders, who 
are to govern. An aristocracy of talent selected by 
hero-worshipers, a government of the wisest and 
best set up by a people with reverence for the wisest 
and best, this was Carlyle's second step in social 
reconstruction. "Find in any country the Ablest 
Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, 
and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect govern- 
ment for that country." ^ Here, therefore, we have 
the Carlylean gospel of the hero, a gospel no less 
famous than the gospel of work and integrating with 

1 Past and Present, 66. 2 /^f^.^ .30. 

^ Heroes and Hero-Worshipy 182. 



96 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

it to make a complete program for the regeneration 
of the social order. The one meaning for Carlyle, it 
will be remembered, in the popular disturbances of 
the time, which was of real significance for the future, 
was the effort to throw off sham leaders and to find 
real ones. Given now a society of workers as the 
basis of the new order, what manner of man should 
they choose for their governor? Who were the 
aristoi and where might they be found? A govern- 
ment of the best, could it be established, were beyond 
doubt "the one healing remedy" for an epoch grown 
sick and distracted. 

Carlyle wrote so much and with so much rep- 
etition concerning his ideal leader that th^re ought 
to have been no confusion of mind as to what he 
meant. By calling his heroes aristoi ^ or best, he 
meant that they were to realize in the highest degree 
possible all the virtues that made a man in the truest 
sense human. The ideal hero is a good man. He is 
a worker, like those whom he represents or leads. He 
is the bravest, justest, noblest of his kind. Most of 
all he is a man of intellect, who by reason of his recti- 
tude and his loyalty to the laws of life has been 
"initiated into discernment of the same." ^ Carlyle^s 
hero is therefore one "who lives in the inward sphere 
of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which 
exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary 
and Trivial. "2 He is one of those who in the words of 
Arnold, "have conquered fate" and 

"Through clouds of individual strife 
Draw homeward to the general life." 

'^Latter-Day Pamphlets^ 91. "^Heroes and Hero-Worships 144. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 97 

The lineaments of this heroic man are brought out 
with clearer precision in Heroes and Hero-Worship 
than elsewhere: he is, first, a man of sincerity, "the 
first characteristic of all men in any way heroic," and 
the basis of whatever originality may lie in him; he is, 
second, a man with the "seeing eye," or the poetic 
gift of vision which "looks through the shows of 
things into things," — he cannot be duped nor misled 
by the false or the superficial; finally, he is a creative 
force, a source of order; — "his mission is order. . . . 
He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into 
a thing ruled, regular;" — he is a maker, not a de- 
stroyer, and he comes like Goethe with a hammer to 
build, not like Voltaire with a torch to burn. He is, 
in truth, a servant of the people no less than their 
leader. 1 

But the Carlylean hero is also a man of power! 
Here we run upon the great rock of oflFense. For our 
leader turns out to be, say the critics, a Nietzschean 
superman, a Hohenzollern drill-sergeant, a vulgar 
strong Hercules or brawny Titan, anything but a 
wise and humane leader! It is true that as Carlyle 
grew older and saw no ebb in the rising tide of de- 
mocracy, he likewise grew increasingly gloomy and 
impatient over the course of events. And he some- 
times expressed himself in a manner that unfortu- 
nately gave jus tifica^tion to the protests of his critics, 
who seemed to have forgotten the wise teaching of 
the prophet (and the exaggerated humor of the 
talker!) and to remember more than all else the 
splenetic ejaculations of a wearied and saddened old 

Past and Present, 222. 



98 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

man. In these later years, especially, Carlyle dis- 
played a readiness to praise the man who in a dis- 
tracted time could get things done^ like Frederick the 
Great, or like Bismarck, whether the methods he used 
were always the most proper or not. But it is to be 
remembered in the first place that he never claimed 
perfection for any of his historical heroes, whose 
strength suffered, he thought, by just in so much as 
it was an ignoble strength. "Napoleon,'* he said, 
"does by no means seem to me so great a man as 
Cromwell. ... An element of blamable ambition 
shows itself, from the first, in this man; gets the 
victory over him at last, and involves him and his 
work in ruin." ^ It is well known that Frederick the 
Great was not one of his genuine heroes, much as he 
admired many aspects of his genius. "That terrible 
practical Doer with the cutting brilliances of mind 
and character, and the irrefragable common-sense," 
as Carlyle called the King, was "to the last a ques- 
tionable hero" with "nothing of a Luther, of a 
Cromwell" in him. 

In the second place Carlyle from first to last main- 
tained that the only might that could endure must be 
founded upon justice. Any power resting upon brute 
force, upon mere will to power, could not last, how- 
ever victorious it might be for the time. He was 
never an apostle of the horrible doctrine that domin- 
ion belonged to the man or the people who could 
conquer and rule by force of arms alone. The Carly- 
ean hero must indeed be brave, for how else could he 
grow wise or his wisdom become effectual? "Your 

^ Heroes and Hero-PForskip, 2 18-2 19* 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 99 

Luther, your Knox, your Anselm, Becket, Abbot 
Samson, Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave 
enough, by what possibility could they ever have 
been wise?" ^ And just as the strength increases and 
makes operative the wisdom, so the wisdom directs 
the strength; the two virtues are complementary and 
inseparable in the heroic character. "The strong 
man, what is he if we will consider? The wise man; 
the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness and 
valour, all of which are the basis of wisdom; who has 
insight into what is what, into what will follow out of 
what, the eye to see and the hand to do; who is fit to 
administer, to direct, and guidingly command: he is 
the strong man. His muscles and bones are no 
stronger than ours; but his soul is stronger, his soul is 
wiser, clearer, — is better and nobler, for that is, has 
been and ever will be the root of all clearness worthy 
of such a name." ^ The victories of such a hero are 
not the victories of mere force: "Of conquest we may 
say that it never yet went by brute force and compul- 
sion; conquest of that kind does not endure. Con- 
quest, along with power of compulsion, an essential 
universally in human society, must bring benefit 
along with it, or men, of the ordinary strength of men, 
will fling it out." ^ To the end of his days Carlyle 
adhered to this belief in the divine strength of right. 
•He never gave assent to the doctrine (as the historian 
Lecky described it) of the divine right of strength. 
"With respect to that poor heresy of might being the 
symbol of right," said he to Froude in 1873, ''^ shall 
have to tell Lecky one day that quite the converse or 

1 Past and Presenty 208. 2 Chartism, 135. ^ 7^;^,^ j^^. 



loo CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

re-verse is (my) real opinion — namely, that right is 
the eternal symbol of might; . . . and that, in fact, 
he probably never met with a son of Adam more 
contemptuous of might except where it rests on the 
above origin." ^ 

It was of course easier for Carlyle to describe his 
able man, or hero, than to tell the British public how 
to find him, — a problem, he shrewdly declared, which 
belonged to the British public. The philistine mind 
has been much amused by the solemn declaration 
that the real superior is chosen by "divine right: he 
who is to be my Ruler, whose will is to be higher than 
my will, was chosen for me in Heaven."^ Carlyle, 
it hardly needs to be said, was never an advocate of 
the historical doctrine of divine right of kings. The 
doctrine of hereditary privilege did not weigh heavily 
in the social philosophy of Diogenes Teufelsdrockh ! 
What he meant in the passage just quoted and what 
he meant in numerous similar statements was that 
the truly able man, or leader, is the gifted man, who, 
living in the inward sphere of things, takes counsel of 
the Unseen and Silent and thus inevitably becomes 

^ Froude, Lije of Carlyle^ IV, 360. Numerous other passages to the 
same effect are to be found in Carlyle's books: e. g. — "Await the issue. 
In all battles, if you await the issue, each fighter has prospered according 
to his right. His right and his might, at the close of the account, were 
one and the same. He has fought with all his might, and in exact pro- 
portion to all his right he has prevailed. His very death is no victory 
over him. He died indeed; but his work lives." {Past and Presenty 10.) 
"What Napoleon didvf'xW in the long-run amount to what he did justly. 
. . . The Ablest Man; he means also the truest-hearted, justest, the 
Noblest Man: what he tells us to do must be precisely the wisest, fittest, 
that we could anywhere or anyhow learn." (Heroes and Hero-Worships 
182, 222.) Cf. also Chartism^ i34-5> IS^J Past and Presenty 164. 

2 Sartor Resartus, 225. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR loi 

a spokesman of the Eternal Order. Now it was 
simply a vital element in Carlyle's faith in God and 
man that given a world in which men of superior 
capacity are born, and given a society in which the 
workers are a majority, the workers will perforce 
reverence and follow the leaders. It is in the nature 
of things that this should be so; " for the great soul of 
the world is just," and the workers must attach them- 
selves to those who represent divine justice, namely, 
the men of superior brains and superior virtues, the 
heroes.^ "Like people, like King'* was thus an 
integral part of Carlyle's political creed, as we have 
seen. He feared democracy, he feared the ballot, he 
feared the widespread hue and cry for reform, only 
because he feared (had not the French Revolution 
taught him to fear?), far more, political power in the 
hands of. a foolish, idle, intemperate, maddened, 
multitude; — a consummation quite the most catas- 
trophic that he could conceive of, carrying with it the 
overthrow of every social principle and every accom- 
plished fact of civilization. He condemned many 
philanthropic schemes for reform only because he was 
afraid that they would end by providing food and 
clothing and shelter for rascals and loafers. But 
political power in the hands of the workers he did not 
fear. Let these be left, he said, to choose their leaders 
by such machinery as would prove effectual,-T-the 
sole justification of political ways and means in any 
case. "To sift and riddle the Nation, so that you 
might extricate and sift-out the true ten gold grains, 
or ablest men, and of these make your Governors or 

* Past and Present, 7, 164. 



I02 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Public Officers; leaving the dross and common sandy 
or silty material safely aside, as the thing to be gov- 
erned, not to govern; certainly all ballot-boxes, cau- 
cuses, Kensington-Common meetings. Parliamen- 
tary debatings. Red Republics, Russian Despotisms, 
and constitutional and unconstitutional methods 
of society among mankind, are intended to achieve 
this one end. . . . The finding of your Ableman and 
getting him invested with the symbols of ability y with 
dignity, worship {worthship)^ royalty. Knighthood, 
or whatever we call it, so that he may actually have 
room to guide according to his faculty of doing it, — is 
the business, well or ill accomplished, of all social 
procedure whatsoever in this world! Hustings- 
speeches, Parliamentary Motions, Reform Bills, 
French Revolutions, all mean at heart this; or else 
nothing." ^ 

Out of a state composed of leaders and workers 

^Latter-Day Pamphlets y 92; Heroes and Hero-Worships 181. Carlyle 
nowhere advocates the abolition of constitutional government. In fact 
he everywhere implies the existence of such a government as the founda- 
tion for all the reforms he proposes: cf. Chartism, 164, also, The English 
in Past and Present, Book III, ch. 5. He believed, however, that in 
the field of political, as opposed to industrial, reform, what was needed 
was reform in administration rather than in parliament; efficient exec- 
utives were needed rather than extension of the franchise. He proposed 
that the Crown should have power to elect "a few" members to Parlia- 
ment, who, as Secretaries under the Prime Minister, should increase the 
efficiency of administration. Chosen solely because of their ability for 
special duties, these officers (minister of works, minister of justice, minis- 
ter of education, etc.) ought immensely to improve and extend the serv- 
ices of the state. In this plan Carlyle saw no " risk or possibility " of 
a bureaucracy. And why? Because of English democracy! "Demo- 
cracy is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial, universal, clearly 
invincible among us henceforth. No danger it should let itself be flung 
in chains by sham-secretaries of the Pedant species, and accept their 
vile Age of Pinchbeck for its Golden Age! " {Latter-Day Pamphlets, 121.) 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 103 

must come the new chivalry of labor. Carlyle called 
it a ''chivalry" of labor, because he found in the old 
medieval social order a spirit which he wished to see 
revived in the new. The feudal past could teach the 
industrial present! The eleventh and twelfth cen- 
turies, the centuries of William the Conqueror, of 
Henry II, of Abbot Samson, were rough and rugged, 
and the methods of getting things done were not the 
smoothest. But Carlyle could never enough praise 
the bold vigor of the knights and the austere piety 
of the saints, whose leadership founded the order, the 
art, and the religion of the wonderful thirteenth 
century. The feudal workers did not live apart from 
their masters in isolation, dependent upon them for 
nothing but payment of wages. Gurth was thrall to 
Cedric, but for that very reason he was not left to 
starve in a workhouse or die of typhus-fever, under a 
system of laissez-faire. Rude and harsh as things 
were, there was yet fealty of man to man, up and 
down the feudal scale; baron protected dependent 
and dependent fought for baron. It was the age of 
the soldier, the fighting man, — immemorial type of 
training, obedience, order, and loyalty to superiors, 
without which a new chivalry of labor would be im- 
possible. The true worker for Carlyle must ever be 
a fighter like one of the Conqueror's warriors. " Man 
is created to fight," said he; "he is perhaps best of all 
definable as a born soldier; his life *a battle and a 
march' under the right general." ^ Looking at the 
statuesque lifeguardsmen who rode sentry at the 
Horse-guards, he was mournfully reminded of what 

^ Past and Present^ 163. 



104 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

at the moment seemed a sole surviving link between 
the past and the present. Out of gray antiquity the 
establishment of soldiery had come down to the 
society of to-day as the obvious symbol of the power 
of organization and the equally obvious proof of the 
changes that could be wrought in human nature. 
What promise was there in this venerable institution 
for a new industrial order, a new chivalry of labor! 
"These thousand straight-standing, firmest individ- 
uals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, 
retreat; and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged 
with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of 
potential activity: few months ago, till the persuasive 
sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged 
losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thiev- 
ish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending 
towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant 
came; by tap of drum enlisted, or found lists of them, 
took heartily to drilling them; — and he and you have 
made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work 
whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining and 
commanding among men." ^ 

But the drill sergeant as a professional man-killer 
was not Carlyle's hero, despite the sneers of critics, 
old and new. He abhorred war. "Under the sky," 
he declared, "is no uglier spectacle than two men 
with clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes, hacking one 
another*s flesh; converting precious living bodies, 
and priceless living souls, into nameless mass of 
putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How 
did a Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything 

^ Past and Present^ 225. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 105 

that was not hideous, scandalous, infernal?" ^ What 
Carlyle of course wished to see was the spirit of the 
fighting soldier, his courage, obedience, and loyalty, 
re-created in the worker of the new era, engaged in 
the warfare of modern industry. "It is forever 
indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity, 
with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, 
tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton; — now with the 
hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. ... O 
Heavens, if we saw an army ninety-thousand strong, 
maintained and fully equipt, in continual real action 
and battle against Human Starvation, against Chaos, 
Necessity, Stupidity, and our real 'natural enemies,' 
what a business it were! Fighting and molesting not 
'the French,' who, poor men, have a hard enough 
battle of their own in the like kind, and need no 
additional molesting from us; but fighting and in- 
cessantly spearing down and destroying Falsehood, 
Nescience, Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil and his 
Angels! "2 Nor was it the spirit of the feudal fighter 
alone that Carlyle would revive in the new age. It 
was the respect for superiorities, for old loyalties and 
pieties, and (not the least !) for the graces and courte- 
sies, the easy dignities and "kingly simplicities,'' that 
characterized lord and lady in the best times of the 
ancestral chivalry. 

How to awaken and preserve these values in human 
nature "in conjunction with inevitable democracy" 
in an industrial era was, he knew, "a work for long 

'^ Past and Present, 163. The reader will in this connection recall the 
famous satire on war in Sartor. 
2 Ibidy 164, 225. 



io6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

years and centuries." For the old order must yield 
to the new! The modern epic must be the epic of 
Tools and The Man instead of Arms and The Man, 
An age of fighting must give place to an age of work- 
ing, — with '* Captains of Industry" for leaders, in- 
stead of ' 'Captains of Chivalry." The blind Plugson 
of Undershot, modern capitalist cotton manufacturer, 
who, like the medieval king, had hitherto been a 
leader, but also, like the medieval pirate, a plunderer, 
must be transformed into a fighting Chevalier, with 
the nobleness of the feudal baron and the bravery of 
the old-time bucanneer. So transformed, captains of 
industry were to become in the future "the true 
Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only true 
ones: Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the 
Devils and Yotuns; and (would) lead on Mankind 
in that great, and alone true, and universal warfare. 
. . . Let the Captains of Industry retire into their 
own hearts, and ask solemnly, If there is nothing but 
vulturous hunger for fine wines, valet reputation and 
gilt carriages, discoverable there ? " ^ The old slavery, 
too, must give place to a new freedom or rather to a 
new feudali'sm of the voluntary kind. No man is to 
be thrall to another: "Gurth could only tend pigs;, 
this one will build cities, conquer waste worlds." 2 
Freely will he subject himself to the guidance, nay, 
even to the authority, of his master, to whom he will 
be attached by bonds quite other than the bonds of 
servitude. He will be bound by the strong force of 
good-will and justice, the only powers that can keep 
men long together. Social progress in other words, 

1 Past and Present^ 233. 2 Ihid., 215. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 107 

could not be effected, Carlyle held, unless men, lead- 
ers and workers alike, could be gradually transformed 
into a fuller and richer humanity. 

The organization of the modern industrial world 
into the new chivalry of labor was the supreme task of 
the future.^ In this task the state must lead. It must 
break up the regime oi laissez-faire and must interfere 
between masters and men. It must organize industry 
and compel obedience to the principle of equal justice 
and equal opportunity for all. And in order to 
accomplish these ends, the state must guide and 
control human activity in ways yet scarcely dreamed 
of. 2 This was a work, as Carlyle well knew, that 
would require years, and perhaps even centuries. He 
harbored no dream of instantaneous social transfor- 
mations, for he understood too clearly the nature of 
man and the magnitude of man's problems.^ The 
ideals of social justice in their broad aspects might be 
easy to state and to defend, but the realization of 
these ideals throughout the complex structure of 
modern society was an enterprise of stupendous 
dimensions, infinitely too difficult to be undertaken or 
even imagined all at once. What Carlyle did urge 

^ Carlyle was alive to the difficulty of his position in making sugges- 
tions, and was not without hesitation in offering them. "Editors are not 
here, foremost of all, to say How. . . . An Editor's stipulated work is to 
apprise i/i<?^ that it must be done. . . . All speech of positive enactments 
were hazardous in those who know this business only by the eye. . . . 
Of Time-Bill, Factory-Bill and other such Bills the present Editor has 
no authority to speak. He knows not, it is for others than he to know, 
in what specific ways it may be feasible to interfere, with Legislation, 
between the Workers and the Master-Workers." {Past and Present^ 
226,231,237.) 

2 Past and Present^ 221, 226; Latter-Day Pamphlets ^ 31. 

2 Past and Present^ 215. 



io8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

from the beginning of his literary career was that the 
task should be started, and started upon the right 
lines. As a working basis for everything else he de- 
manded investigation. "Our political Economists," 
he said in 1830, at a time of acute and wide- 
spread disturbance, "should collect statistical /^^/j 
such as, 'What is the lowest sum a man can live on in 
various countries? What is the highest he gets to 
live on? How many people work with their hands? 
How many with their heads? How many not at all?' 
and innumerable such. What we all want to know is 
the condition of our fellow-men; and strange to say it 
is the thing least of all understood, or to be under- 
stood as matters go.'' ^ He vigorously assailed and 
ridiculed a government that debated endlessly on 
minor issues and left the major ones to take care of 
themselves: "The old grand question, whether A is to 
be in office or B, with the innumerable subsidiary 
questions growing out of that, courting paragraphs 
and suffrages for a blessed solution of that: Canada 
question, Irish Appropriation question, West-India 
question. Queen's Bedchamber question; Game Laws, 
Usury Laws; African Blacks, Hill Coolies, Smithfield 
cattle, and Dog-carts, — all manner of questions and 
subjects, except simply this the alpha and omega of 
all! Surely Honourable Members ought to speak of 
the Condi tion-of-England question too." ^ That 
Carlyle himself knew what this question involved we 
find in a passage closely following the preceding, a 
passage that reveals a grasp of the practical problems 
worthy of the best present-day investigators: — 

* Froude, Life of Carlyle^ II, 67. ^ Chartism^ 112. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 109 

"What constitutes the well-being of a man? Many 
things; of which the wages he gets, and the bread 
he buys with them, are but one preliminary item. 
Grant, however, that the wages were the whole; 
that once knowing the wages and the price of bread, 
we know all; then what are the wages? Statistic 
Inquiry, in its present unguided condition, cannot 
tell. The average rate of day's wages is not cor- 
rectly ascertained for any portion of this country; 
not only not for half-centuries, it is not even ascer- 
tained anywhere for decades or years: far from insti- 
tuting comparisons with the past, the present itself 
is unknown to us. And then, given the average of 
wages, what is the constancy of employment: what is 
the difficulty of finding employment; the fluctuation 
from season to season, from year to year? Is it 
constant, calculable wages; or fluctuating, incalcu- 
lable, more or less of the nature of gambling? This 
secondary circumstance, of quality in wages, is per- 
haps even more important than the primary one of 
quantity. Farther we ask. Can the laborer, by 
thrift and industry, hope to rise to mastership; or is 
such hope cut off from him? How is he related to 
his employer; by bonds of friendliness and mutual 
help; or by hostility, opposition, and chains of mutual 
necessity alone? In a word, what degree of content- 
ment can a human creature be supposed to enjoy in 
that position? With hunger preying on him, his 
contentment is likely to be small! But even with 
abundance, his discontent, his real misery may be 
great. The laborer's feelings, his notion of being 
justly dealt with or unjustly; his wholesome compo- 



no CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

sure, frugality, prosperity in the one case, his acrid 
unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin 
in the other, — how shall figures of arithmetic repre- 
sent all this ? So much is still to be ascertained; much 
of it by no means easy to ascertain! Till, among the 
*Hill Cooly' and * Dog-Cart' questions, there arise in 
Parliament and extensively out of it ' a Condition-of- 
England question,' and quite a new set of inquirers 
and methods, little of it is likely to be ascertained. . . 
A Legislature making laws for the Working Classes, 
in total uncertainty as to these things, is legislating 
in the dark; not wisely, nor to good issues. The 
simple fundamental question. Can the laboring man 
in this England of ours, who is willing to labor, find 
work, and subsistence by his work? is matter of mere 
conjecture and assertion hitherto; not ascertainable 
by authentic evidence: the Legislature, satisfied to 
legislate in the dark, has not yet sought any evidence 
on it/' 1 

Here was work on a large scale for the state to 
undertake. Until facts were available, Carlyle 
insisted, it was folly to propose solutions to specific 
problems. He did declare, however, not only that 
there should be an organization of labor under the 
new chivalry of workers and masters, and that the 
work of organization should be mainly done by the 
state; he confidently laid down also certain principles 
by which he believed men should be guided in the 
work of reconstruction and upon which all specific 
measures should be based. To begin with, he re- 
peated his old doctrines that government can only do 

^Qhariism, 117, 118. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR in 

what the people demand of it and that the first push, 
so to speak, in reorganization must come from the 
industrial workers themselves, masters and men, who 
see the problems as no others can. "The main sub- 
stance of this immense Problem of Organizing Labor, 
and first of all of Managing the Working Class, will, 
it is very clear, have to be solved by those who stand 
practically in the middle of it; by those who them- 
selves work and preside over work. Of all that can be 
enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs 
must already lie potentially extant in those two 
Classes, who are to obey such enactment." ^ That is 
to say, there must grow up proper human relations 
between the captains of industry and their men. In 
the new order the captain will be a kind of servant, 
ready to do the greatest good to the greatest number,, 
ambitious to be a just master rather than a rich 
master, one who knows his men and can win from 
them steadfast loyalty by reason of his fair and hu- 
mane leadership. The cash-nexus as the sole connect- 
ing link must go. " Love of men cannot be bought by 
cash-payment; and without love men cannot endure 
to be together." ^ With love there must go justice. 
No worker in the new chivalry of labor must be 
dependent upon the charity of his superiors. "Not 
to be supported by roundsmen systems, by never so 
liberal parish doles, or lodged in free and easy work- 
houses when distress overtakes him; not for this, 
however in words he may clamor for it; not for this, 

* Past and Present, 23 1. 

^ Ibid., 233. Cf. "It is not by Mechanism, but by Religion; 
not by Self-interest, but by Loyalty, that men are governed or govern- 
able." {Characteristics, 37.) 



112 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

but for something far different does the heart of him 
struggle. It is * for justice' that he struggles; for * just 
wages/ — not in money alone! An ever-toiling in- 
ferior, he would fain (though as yet he knows it not) 
find for himself a superior that should lovingly and 
wisely govern: is not that too the *just wages' of his 
service done? It is for manlike place and relation, in 
this world where he sees himself a man, that he 
struggles." ^ 

But if, in the new order, masters and men are 
united by relations of love and justice, other relations 
and conditions will immediately spring up from these. 
A fair cash payment for a fair day's work must be the 
indispensable first step in all industrial and commer- 
cial operations whatsoever; and it will be the business 
of the state to insure this. " *A fair day's-wages for 
a fair day's-work': it is as just a demand as Governed 
men ever made of Governing. It is the everlasting 
right of man. . . . The progress of Human Society 
consists ever in this same. The better and better 
apportioning of wages to work. Give me this, you 
have given me all. Pay to every man accurately 
what he has worked for, what he has earned and done 
and deserved, — to this man broad lands and honors, 
to that man high gibbets and treadmills: what more 
have I to ask? Heaven's Kingdom, which we daily 
pray for, has come; God's will is done on Earth even 
as it is in Heaven ! This is the radiance of celestial 
Justice; in the light or in the fire of which all impedi- 
ments, vested interests, and iron cannon, are more 
and more melting like wax, and disappearing from the 

^ Chartism f 123. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 113 

pathways of men. A thing ever struggling forward; 
irrepressible, advancing inevitable; perfecting itself, 
all days, more and more, — never to be perfect till that 
general Doomsday, the ultimate Consummation, and 
Last of earthly Days." ^ 

Compulsory universal Education is the second 
great task for the state. Intelligence must be diffused 
over the world like sunlight, if society is to be quick- 
ened into new life. The peasant-born Carlyle never 
forgot what knowledge might mean to the ignorant 
and poor. It was the prime necessity of man. To 
impart the gift of thinking to those who could not 
think was the first function of government. In a 
period when the British Empire had no system of 
national training, when parliament debated whether 
"a small fraction of the Revenue of one Day (30,000/. 
is but that) " should be expended upon education, 
when dissenters called for one scheme and the Church 
of England for another, and when illiteracy was 
universal, Carlyle came forward not only with a stern 
demand for general education, but with wise practical 
suggestions for realizing his demand. How, he asked, 
could twenty-four millions of striking, rick-burning, 
discontented, and illiterate toilers be brought into 
order and happy labor by the intellectual leadership 
of a mere handful of the aristoi alone? "The intel- 
lect of a Bacon, the energy of a Luther, if left to their 
own strength, might pause in dismay before such a 
task." It could not be done! The workers must 
themselves be educated to the extent of their capac- 
ity, so that their knowledge and energy might be 

^ Past and Present, i6, 17. 



114 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

contributed collectively to the solution of great social 
problems. Some official, appointed by the state, 
working with a national committee, should send 
schoolmasters and "hornbooks** into every parish 
and hamlet of England to see that all were taught to 
read, under penalties and civil disabilities for those 
who should disobey the law ! — " So that, in ten years 
hence, an Englishman who could not read might be 
acknowledged as a monster." ^ 

A fair day's wage for a fair day's work and univer- 
sal compulsory education were thus to be the founda- 
tions in the new chivalry of labor. But Carlyle's 
program of reform went very much further and in- 
cluded other aims and purposes of a comprehensive 
character, some of which have been carried out since 
his day, while others await fulfilment in times to 
come. Carlyle would hardly be called timid even by 
his most fanatical disciples; and yet (such was the 
force of public opinion in 1850 against state interfer- 
ence) he brought forward some of his most suggestive 
proposals in a tentative and hesitating spirit, lest they 
should be condemned out of hand as "visionary." 
On one principle, however, he was firm as adamant, — 
the principle of permanence of employment. The 
organization of industry upon the old basis of "no- 
madic" contract must be abandoned as hopeless. 
Employers and workers alike should be bound to- 
gether in loyalty to a common cause, cherishing as 
their chief glory the glory of work well done, and as 
their chief disgrace the failure to perform their part in 

1 Chartism, i8o; cf. also, Past and Present, 228; Latter-Day Pamphlets, 
142; Shooting Niagara, 233. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 115 

the collective task. Only through permanent contract 
could this ideal be realized. A man must have time^ 
if he is to come into possession of a house and home, 
if he is to strike his roots into congenial soil — not his 
"oak-roots" merely, but his "heart-roots'' also! 
For it is only when such rootage has been established 
that nourishment can be drawn from the hidden 
sources of life, those memories and associations, both 
domestic and commercial, out of which are created 
the incorruptible stability essential to every worker. 
But the principle of permanent contract, Carlyle 
thought, depended upon another principle, which 
(writing in 1843) he seemed to regard as too advanced 
and too full of difficulties to be more than mentioned. 
He meant the principle of permanent economic 
interest in the management of the industry. "A 
question arises here,*' he says: "Whether, in some 
ulterior, perhaps some not far-distant stage of the 
'Chivalry of Labor,' your Master-Worker may not 
find it possible, and needful, to grant his Workers 
permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs? So 
that it become, in practical result, what in essential 
fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, 
from the Chief Master down to the lowest Overseer 
and Operative, economically as well as loyally con- 
cerned for it? — ^Which question I do not answer. 
The answer, near or else far, is perhaps. Yes; — and 
yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is essential 
in most enterprises; I am told they do not tolerate 
'freedom of debate' on board a Seventy-four! Re- 
publican senate and plehiscita would not answer well 
in Cotton-Mills. And yet observe there too: Free- 



ii6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

dom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's 
Freedom, this is indispensable. We must have it, 
and will have it! To reconcile Despotism with Free- 
dom: — well, is that such a mystery? Do you not 
already know the way ? It is to make your Despotism 
just. Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny 
and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, 
and have no * Freedom' at all but in obeying them. 
The way is already known, part of the way, — and 
courage and some qualities are needed for walking 
on it!"^ The note in this remarkable utterance, 
however hesitating, is the note of prophecy. The 
penetrating eye of the seer had a fleeting revelation 
of the far future, when control in industry should be 
democratic and the spirit in it, the spirit of fellowship. 
But if English industries are to be set right, they 
must not only be created upon the principles of per- 
manence of contract and co-operative control; they 
must recover from their paroxysm of competition and 
must undertake the tasks of distribution upon a 
wholly new basis. The England of Carlyle's day 
believed that national existence depended upon 
selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell 
cheaper than any other people, — with what disas- 
trous effects upon English life both Carlyle and 
Ruskin have eloquently set forth. In the new era, 
under a chivalry of labor, inventive minds will quit 
their ceaseless efforts to sell cotton at cut-throat 
prices, and will turn their attention to the problems 
of fairer distribution at prices consistent with a just 
standard of life. " To be a noble Master, among noble 

* Past and Present^ 241. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 117 

Workers," said Carlyle, "will again be the first am- 
bition with some few; to be a rich Master only the 
second. How the Inventive Genius of England, with 
the whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved some- 
what into the backgrounds of the brain, will contrive 
and devise, not cheaper produce exclusively, but 
fairer distribution of the produce at its present 
cheapness!"^ 

In truth, once you introduce the principle of gov- 
ernmental or social control, upon a basis of sounder 
ethical values in human life, your field of reconstruc- 
tion, both for private and for public enterprise, 
becomes unlimited. It was in the wider and wider 
establishment of this principle that Carlyle saw hope 
for the society of the future. His vision of what 
might be done was truly far-sighted, and perhaps 
nothing so well evidences his prophetic sense of the 
possibilities in store for some form of community 
control as the following passage from Past and Pres- 
ent^ written of course years before many of its proph- 
ecies were even begun to be realized: — "Of Time-Bill, 
Factory-Bill and other such Bills the present Editor 
has no authority to speak. He knows not, it is for 

'^Fast and Present 232; cj. also, ihid.., 157-8. It is perhaps worth 
while in this connection to note that Carlyle, in spite of his condemnation 
of money-loving Captains of Industry of the unreformed Plugson type 
and of his large emphasis upon the moral relations of business and indus- 
try, was not without sanity and practical sense respecting commerce 
and its machinery: "I know Mammon too; Banks of England, Credit- 
Systems, world-wide possibilities of work and traffic; and applaud and 
admire them. Mammon is Hke Fire; the usefulest of all servants, if the 
frightfulest of all Masters! .... Those Laws of the Shop-till are in- 
disputable to me; and practically useful in certain departments of the 
Universe, as the multiplication table itself." {Past and Present^ 247; 
Latter-Da'^ Pamphlets ^ 38.) 



ii8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

others than he to know, in what specific ways it may 
be feasible to interfere, with Legislation, between the 
Workers and the Master- Workers; — knows only and 
sees, what all men are beginning to see, that Legisla- 
tive interference, and interferences not a few are 
indispensable; that as a lawless anarchy of supply- 
and-demand, on market-wages alone, this province 
of things cannot longer be left. Nay interference has 
begun: there are already Factory Inspectors, — who 
seem to have no lack of work. Perhaps there might 
be Mine-Inspectors too: — might there not be Furrow- 
field Inspectors withal, and ascertain for us how on 
seven and sixpence a week a human family does live! 
Interference has begun; it must continue, must ex- 
tensively enlarge itself, deepen and sharpen itself. 
Such things cannot longer be idly lapped in darkness, 
and suffered to go on unseen: the Heavens do see 
them; the curse, not the blessing of the Heavens is on 
an Earth that refuses to see them. 

" Again, are not Sanitary Regulations possible for a 
Legislature? The old Romans had their iEdiles; who 
would, I think, in direct contravention to supply-and- 
demand, have rigorously seen rammed up into total 
abolition many a foul cellar in our Southwarks, 
Saint-Gileses, and dark poison-lanes; saying sternly, 
'Shall a Roman man dwell there?' The Legislature, 
at whatever cost of consequences, would have had to 
answer, *God forbid!* — ^The Legislature, even as it 
now is, could order all dingy Manufacturing Towns 
to cease from their soot and darkness; to let in the 
blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become 
clear and clean; to burn their coal-smoke, namely. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 119 

and make flame of it. Baths, free air, a wholesome 
temperature, ceilings twenty feet high, might be 
ordained, by Act of Parliament, in all establishments 
licensed as Mills. There are such Mills already 
extant; — honor to the builders of them! The Legis- 
lature can say to others: Go ye and do likewise; better 
if you can. 

" Every toiling Manchester, Its smoke and soot all 
burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide con- 
quests, to have a hundred acres or so of free green- 
field, with trees on it, conquered, for its little children 
to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to take a 
breath of twilight air in? You would say so! A 
willing Legislature could say so with effect. A willing 
Legislature could say very many things! And to 
whatsoever 'vested interest,* or such like, stood up, 
gainsaying merely, 'I shall lose profits,' — the willing 
Legislature would answer, *Yes, but my sons and 
daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul.' — 
*What is to become of our Cotton-trade?' cried 
certain Spinners, when the Factory Bill was pro- 
posed; 'What is to become of our invaluable Cotton- 
trade?' The Humanity of England answered stead- 
fastly; 'Deliver me these rickety perishing souls of 
infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance. 
God Himself commands the one thing; not God 
especially the other thing. We cannot have prosper- 
ous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping the 
Devil a partner in them!'"^ In another passage, 

* Past and Present^ 226. Carlyle praised the new Poor Laws (of 1834) 
for its substitution of government commissioners in place of the local 
overseers of the old ineffectual corrupt system. {Chartism, 123). He 
repeatedly advocated state aid to emigration as a sound means of reliev- 



I20 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

written in 1867, a passage that suggests the influence 
of Ruskin even more than the passage just quoted, 
Carlyle looked forward to very definite invasions of 
British industrial and social "rights" through laws to 
be enacted by a wise legislature. " Most certain it is, 
an immense Body of Laws upon these new Industrial, 
Commercial, Railway, etc. Phenomena of ours are 
pressingly wanted; and none of mortals knows where 
to get them. For example, the Rivers and running 
Streams of England; primordial elements of this our 
poor Birthland, face-features of it, created by Heaven 
itself: Is Industry free to tumble out whatever hor- 
ror of refuse it may have arrived at into the nearest 
crystal brook? Regardless of gods and men and 
little fishes. Is Free Industry free to convert all our 
rivers into Acheron tic sewers; England generally into 
a roaring sooty smithes forge? Are we all doomed 
to eat dust, as the old Serpent was, and to breathe 
solutions of soot? Can a Railway Company with 
'Promoters* manage, by feeing certain men in the 
bombazeen, to burst through your bedroom in the 
night-watches, and miraculously set all your crockery 
jingling? Is an Englishman's house still his castle; 
and in what sense?" ^ 

But these and other great ends will not be realized 
until the state shall have created the new chivalry 
of labor. To this ideal Carlyle returned as his highest 
conception of social reform. Again and again there 

ing congested populations, and as an antidote to Malthusian doctrines. 
(Sartor, 209; Characteristics, 35; Chartism, 182-186.) He urged, indeed, 
the establishment of a government emigration service. {Past and Pres- 
ent, 225.) 

1 Shooting Niagara, 239. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 121 

rose up before him the vision of what a government 
might do that could drill thousands of discontented, 
idle, disunited individuals into an army of soldiers for 
the purposes of war, — obedient, united, loyal, brave! 
Why might not a vast and powerful collective effort 
such as this be applied to the infinitely tangled social 
problems of the modern world, — to the work of saving 
and beautifying life, instead of maiming or destroy- 
ing it? Let Government, then, proceed to organize 
" industrial regiments of the New Era." Let there be 
soldiers of industry as well as soldiers of war. The 
paupers and idlers should be regimented first, and 
compelled to work, if they would not willingly do so. 
Gradually, year by year, decade by decade, genera- 
tion after generation, the organization would spread 
outward and upward, until in all industries there 
would be captains and soldiers of the new chivalry. 
Thus directed by the state through wise masters 
and loyal, contented servants, government-controlled 
industries would furnish models for private enter- 
prise, — which in turn would be compelled, through 
force of example and through force of associated 
workers, to regiment its workers and to substitute 
the spirit of co-operation for the spirit of competition 
in all its multitudinous ranks, until its reorganization 
were complete. "Wise obedience and wise command, 
I foresee that the regimenting of Pauper Banditti into 
Soldiers of Industry is but the beginning of this 
blessed process, which will extend to the topmost 
heights of our Society; and, in the course of genera- 
tions, make us all once more a Governed Common- 
wealth, and Civitas Dei, if it please God ! Waste-land 



122 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Industrials succeeding, other kinds of Industry, as 
cloth-making, shoe-making, plough-making, spade- 
making, house-building, — in the end, all kinds of 
Industry whatsoever, will be found capable of regi- 
menting. Mill-operatives, all manner of free opera- 
tives, as yet unregimented, nomadic under private 
masters, they, seeing such example and its blessed- 
ness, will say: 'Masters, you must regiment us a little; 
make our interests with you permanent a little, 
instead of temporary and nomadic; we will enlist 
with the State otherwise ! * This will go on, on the one 
hand, while the State-operation goes on, on the other: 
thus will all Masters of Workmen, private Captains 
of Industry, be forced to incessantly co-operate with 
the State and its public Captains; they regimenting 
in their way, the State in its way, with ever-widening 
field; till their fields meet (so to speak) and coalesce, 
and there be no unregimented worker, or such only 
as are fit to remain unregimented, any more." ^ The 
wonderful possibilities of appeal to the spiritual 
forces in human nature contained in such a reorgani- 
zation of industry was suggested by Carlyle in his 
last political essay: "What is to hinder the acknowl- 
edged King in all corners of his territory, to introduce 
wisely a universal system of Drill, not military only, 
but human in all kinds; so that no child or man born 
in his territory might miss the benefit of it, — which 
would be immense to man, woman and child? I 
would begin with it, in mild, soft forms, so soon 
almost as my children were able to stand on their legs; 
and I would never wholly remit it till they had done 

^Latter-Day Pamphlets ^ 141. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 123 

with the world and me. Poor Wilderspin knew 
something of this; the great Goethe evidently knew a 
great deal ! This of outwardly combined and plainly 
consociated Discipline, in simultaneous movement 
and action, which may be practical, symbolical, 
artistic, mechanical in all degrees and modes, — is one 
of the noblest capabilities of man (most sadly under- 
valued hitherto); and one he takes the greatest 
pleasure in exercising and unfolding, not to mention 
at all the invaluable benefit it would afford him if 
unfolded. From correct marching in line, to rhyth- 
mic dancing to cotillion or minuet, — and to infinitely 
higher degrees (that of symboling in concert your 
* first reverence,' for instance, supposing reverence 
and symbol of it to be both sincere!) — there is a 
natural charm in it; the fulfilment of a deep-seated, 
universal desire, to all rhythmic social creatures! In 
man's heaven-born Docility, or power of being 
Educated, it is estimable as perhaps the deepest and 
richest element; or the next to that of music, of Sensi- 
bility to Song, to Harmony and Number, which some 
have reckoned the deepest of all. A richer mine than 
any in California for poor human creatures; richer by 
what a multiple; and hitherto as good as never 
opened, — worked only for the Fighting purpose."^ 
Thus "by degrees" there will come a renewed soci- 
ety, an ideal world towards which each generation, 
playing its part, may hasten an approximation; — 
a vast federated community of heroic workers, each 
unit of which does its work in its appointed place. 
"Give every man the meed of honor he has merited, 

^Shooting Niagara, 235. 



124 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

you have the ideal world of poets; a hierarchy of 
beneficences, your noblest man at the summit of 
affairs, and in every place the due gradation of the 
fittest for that place: a maximum of wisdom works 
and administers, followed, as is inevitable, by a 
maximum of success. It is a world such as the idle 
poets dream of, — such as the active poets, the heroic 
and the true of men, are incessantly toiling to achieve, 
and more and more realize. Achieved, realized, it 
never can be; striven after and approximated to, it 
must forever be, — woe to us if at any time it be not! 
Other aim in this Earth we have none. Renounce 
such aim as vain and hopeless, reject it altogether, 
what more have you to reject? You have renounced 
fealty to Nature and its almighty Maker. ... To 
give our approval aright, — alas, to do every one of us 
what lies in him, that the honorable man every- 
where, and he only have honor, that the able man 
everywhere be put into the place which is fit for him, 
which is his by eternal right: is not this the sum of all 
social morality for every citizen of this world? This 
one duty perfectly done, what more could the world 
have done for it? The world in all departments and 
aspects of it were a perfect world; everywhere admin- 
istered by the best wisdom discernible in it, every- 
where enjoying the exact maximum of success and 
felicity possible for it.*' ^ 

Carlyle's hope for the inauguration of this new 
order rested upon a "remnant" already in exist- 
ence, — the few noble masters and the small company 
of noble workers, to whom he made his final appeal. 

^ Latter-Day Pamphlets y 220, 221. 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 125 

He called upon them, from the Prime Minister down 
to the least citizen, to lead in the huge task of resist- 
ing the rising tide of anarchy and unrest,^ But his 
call was directed chiefly to the small company of 
aristoiy or noble few, who must at all costs keep in 
control the revolutionary spirit of the many. He 
looked for some response from the ranks of the titular 
aristocracy, but he believed that the burden of the 
work of wise social leadership in the future would fall 
upon the ^* natural" aristocracy. Of these, he said, 
there are two orders, — the men of genius (writers, 
poets, seers, sages), and the men of industry, since 
the true captain of industry is "already almost an 
Aristocrat by class." To these he called as to a select 
company of the gifted^ men of vision, men of courage, 
men of natural nobility, each working in his proper 
field, according to his ability, each loyally co-operat- 
ing to bring about the new chivalry of labor. 2 Under 
the leadership of these "industrial heroes," there 
shall be created an ever increasing company of work- 
ers who by their associated labors shall fashion the 
material for the new epic of the future. It shall not 
be another song of brutal victories over brother men, 
but a song of conquests over "Discord, Idleness, 
Injustice, Unreason, and Chaos." Carlyle's vision of 
a reconstructed social order culminates in a challeng- 
ing chant to this militant fellowship of to-morrow: — 
"But it is to you, ye Workers, who do already work, 
and are as grown men, noble and honorable in a sort, 

1 Carlyle regarded Sir Robert Peel as the man called by destiny to be 
foremost in the new movement. Cf. Latter-Day Pamphlets, 143-4; also 
ibid., 108-142. 

2 Shooting Niagara, 212-219; Past and Present, 248-249, 253-255. 



126 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

that the whole world calls for new work and noble- 
ness. Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread despair, 
by manfulness, justice, mercy, and wisdom. Chaos 
is dark, deep as Hell; let the light be, and there is 
instead a green flowery World. Oh, it is great, and 
there is no other greatness. To make some nook of 
God's Creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy 
of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, 
manfuler, happier, — more blessed, less accursed! It 
is work for a God. Sooty Hell of mutiny and 
savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made 
a kind of Heaven; cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of 
its need to mutiny; the everlasting arch of Heaven's 
azure overspanning // too, and its cunning mechanism 
and tall chimney-steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God 
and all men looking on it well pleased. 

"Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted 
tears or heart's-blood of men, or any defacement of 
the Pit, noble fruitful Labor, growing ever nobler, 
will come forth, — the grand sole miracle of Man; 
whereby Man has risen from the low places of this 
Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. Ploughers, 
Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brind- 
leys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs, 
and noble men, and gods are of one grand Host; 
immeasurable; marching ever forward since the begin- 
nings of the World. The enormous, all-conquering, 
flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier in it; sacred, 
and alone noble. Let him who is not of it hide him- 
self; let him tremble for himself. Stars at every 
button cannot make him noble; sheaves of Bath- 
garters, nor bushels of Georges; nor any other con- 



THE NEW CHIVALRY OF LABOR 127 

trivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly taking 
place and step in it. O Heavens, will he not bethink 
himself; he too is so needed in the Host! It were so 
blessed, thrice-blessed, for himself and for us all. In 
hope of the Last Partridge, and some Duke of Wei- 
mar among our English Dukes, we will be patient 
yet a while. "^ 

^Past and Present, 255. 



CHAPTER IV 
MASTER AND DISCIPLE 

"The one soul now in the world who seems to feel as 
I do on the highest matters, and speaks mir aus dem 
Herzen exactly what I wanted to hear. . . . Many, 
many are the Phoebus Apollo celestial arrows you still 
have to shoot into the foul Pythons and poison our 
abominable Megatheriums and Plesiosaurians that go 
staggering about, large as cathedrals, in our sunk Epoch 
again." — Carlyle (letter to Ruskin, 1869). 

"Only one man in England — ^Thomas Carlyle — ^to 
whom I can look for steady guidance. . . . Read your 
Carlyle with all your heart, and with the best of brain you 
can give; and you will learn from him first, the eternity of 
good law, and the need of obedience to it: then, concerning 
your own immediate business, you will learn farther this, 
that the beginning of all good law, and nearly the end of it, 
is in these two ordinances, — ^That every man shall do good 
work for his bread: and secondly, that every man shall 
have good bread for his work." — Ruskin. 

In 1850 Carlyle finished his Latter-Day Pamph- 
lets. In 1852 he entered upon the long wrestle 
of thirteen years with his last great work, the 
History of Frederick the Great. He withdrew to the 
sound-proof room constructed upon the roof of his 
house at No. 5 Cheyne Row, as a refuge from the dis- 
tracting noises of near-by fowls and pianos; and 
henceforth, "sucked by the mud-nymphs" into the 
depths of old folios and documents, he was little seen 
except by a small circle of admirers, who came regu- 
larly to hear his lamentations upon the swift down- 

128 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 129 

ward course of society, — lamentations lighted up by 
the incomparably graphic sketches of men and events 
for which the sage of Chelsea was by this time famous. 
Always inclined to be a solitary student, Carlyle was 
more than ever secluded during these later years of 
haggard toil. True to his own gospel of labor to the 
end, however, he completed the Frederick in 1865, in 
five monumental volumes. But the task had nearly 
broken him, and had left him an old man. He was 
still further shattered in this year by the sudden 
death of Mrs. Carlyle. Only once more, in 1867, the 
year of the second Reform Bill, therefore, did he 
really speak out in print on the condition of Eng- 
land, — in a kind of final latter-day pamphlet called 
Shooting Niagara and After. His literary life was 
practically over. An embattled veteran, he now 
retired from the field and left the struggle to other 
and younger leaders, of whom the most brilliant and 
most effectual, in his opinion, was his disciple, John 
Ruskin. 

No other event in the literary history of the nine- 
teenth century is at first thought more surprising 
than that Ruskin, lover of beauty and evangelist of 
art, should become in any sense a disciple of Carlyle, 
who seldom spoke of art but with contempt and who 
rarely regarded nature but as the somber and solemn 
theater of man's struggles or as the mystical mani- 
festation of a transcendental God. The contrasts are 
indeed more conspicuous to us than the similarities, 
particularly if we recall the first forty years in the life 
of each. Carlyle, peasant born, reached success and 
renown after years of effort along a pathway beset 



I30 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

with obstacles, and his struggles left him grim and 
defiant in temper and infinitely stern in his concep- 
tion of the work that man was created to do. It was 
far otherwise with Ruskin. The road upon which he 
was destined to travel seems to have been marked 
out for him from the beginning and to have led him 
swiftly and brilliantly to fame. His parentage was 
Scotch, though he was born in London, the only 
child of a prosperous wine-merchant. The elder 
Ruskin was a gentleman-merchant of the olden time, 
a man of refined and cultivated tastes, who read the 
best literature, could put his son through two books 
of Livy, knew how to paint a little ("He never 
allowed me for an instant to look at a bad picture," 
said the son), delighted in architecture and landscape, 
and cherished a distant and romantic reverence for the 
nobility and for aristocratic environments. The in- 
tensely ethical spirit that was born in the boy and 
that forty years later attached him so strongly to 
Carlyle must have come mainly, although not en- 
tirely, from his mother. She was a severe and narrow- 
minded Puritan, proud, reserved and domestically 
devoted, — a woman, evidently, of great strength of 
mind, but very rigid, very formal, and very precise. 
In his Prceterita Ruskin has described with great 
fulness and charm the home and the education which 
these parents provided for him. The picture is not 
without its somber coloring, for the reader cannot 
overlook the "monastic severities and aristocratic 
dignities" of that sheltered household, where there 
were few playthings and no playmates, and where the 
puritanical gloom of recurring Sundays left a shadow 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 131 

upon the memory of the sensitive boy. But the 
youthful ecstasies would have lost something of their 
intensity, perhaps, without these tragic contrasts. 
At any rate no reader of Ruskin is likely to forget the 
autobiographical accounts of those fortunate influ- 
ences and activities that had so much to do with the 
making of the man; — the early reading of Scott, 
Shakespeare, Pope's Homer, and the Bible, the 
drawing and sketching, the unsatiable curiosity over 
nature's ways, and the wonderful coaching tours all 
about England, Scotland, and Wales, and on the con- 
tinent. His father, a "beautiful reader," was accus- 
tomed to read aloud, in the small home circle, from 
the best poetry and prose, always choosing what was 
most wholesome and noble. His mother with heroic 
resolution obliged him to read the Bible "every 
syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, about 
once a year," for at least sixteen times, and to com- 
mit long chapters to memory, thus teaching him, he 
says, to know that "accuracy of diction means 
accuracy of sensation." The influence of nature was 
ever more formative than that of books. Ruskin's 
passionate and life-long delight in natural beauty 
sprang from the deepest sources of his soul. "The 
habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind," he 
says, was the "main faculty" of his life. He tells in 
Frceterita of his "rapturous and riveted attention" 
to the ways of plants and running water; of his star- 
ing "all day long at the tumbling and creaming 
strength of the sea"; of his "indescribable rapture" 
when allowed to enter a cave in order to see its 
mineral deposits, for mineralogy always inspired him 



132 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

with its "romantic and visionary charm.'* He tells, 
too, of his watching the "rich color of the folds and 
creases" of the pulpit-cushion, when thumped by the 
tedious preacher, and of his looking with "closest 
attention'* upon the "proceedings of any bricklayers, 
stone-sawyers, or paviers." These innate aptitudes 
of the boy were quickened and cultivated in the best 
of all possible ways. It was the annual custom of the 
elder Ruskin for many years to spend several weeks 
of the summer in traveling by coach about the coun- 
try-side taking orders for sherry from aristocratic 
patrons. After the most delightful and leisurely 
fashion they visited castles, cathedrals, ruins, galler- 
ies, parks, lakes, and mountains, omitting nothing of 
historical or intrinsic interest the country over. 
These were days of "passionate happiness" for the 
youthful Ruskin, whose sensitive mind was all the 
while laying up an inexhaustible treasure of beautiful 
impressions. It was at this time that impulses were 
awakened in his heart, of which he spoke years after, 
when busy with art work in Verona: "There is a 
strong instinct in me which I cannot analyse to draw 
and describe the things I love — not for reputation, 
nor for the good of others, nor for my own advantage, 
but a sort of instinct like that for eating or drinking." 
And so he began to keep a diary and to write verses 
without number, and to draw (for drawing lessons 
had already commenced), recreating by word or line 
the scenes that never ceased to thrill him. Thus 
started in youth a career that continued without 
interruption for fifty-eight years (Ruskin's first 
printed book appeared in 1830, his last in 1889). 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 133 

Meanwhile his formal education went on with the 
help of private tutors, until he was graduated in 1842 
from Christ Church College, Oxford. 

Ruskin*s leap into fame the next year with the 
publication of the first volume of Modern Painters is 
inseparably connected with the name of Turner. By 
1843, Turner's reputation as the first of landscape 
painters was established; he had long been a member 
of the Royal Academy, he had made a fortune from 
his pictures, and he was now living the life of an 
eccentric recluse. But he was passing into his later 
manner, and the critics were violently attacking his 
work. In the brutally frank language then current, 
they described his paintings as meaningless dreams, 
impossible and ridiculous. These attacks raised 
Ruskin to "the height of a black anger," and he at 
once rushed to the defense of his idol with the aban- 
don of youth and genius. Young as he was, his 
enthusiasm for Turner was even then old. Perhaps 
the most precious gift he ever received was a copy of 
Roger's Italy ^ illustrated with vignettes by Turner, 
which came to him at his thirteenth birthday. He 
began copying the artist at fourteen, and at seventeen 
he flung off his first reply to Blackwood's criticism, a 
defense in which he spoke of Turner's art as "embod- 
ied enchantment, delineated magic," and as "seizing 
the soul and essence of nature." Before he was 
twenty-one, his father had given him two Turners, 
and when he was of age he began collecting for him- 
self, until the Ruskin house contained one of the 
choicest collections in England, numbering even by 
i860, says his biographer, "two oil pictures and more 



134 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

than a hundred drawings and sketches/' "When I 
die/* Ruskin said once to a visitor at Brantwood to 
whom he was showing the Turners in his bedroom, 
"I hope that they may be the last things my eyes 
will rest on in this world." They were to him a sym- 
bol of all the loveliness in nature and of all the mys- 
tery and tragedy in man, — "studied melodies of 
exquisite color" and "deeply-toned poems/* an 
epitome of all that he best loved in nature and 
most revered in art. 

The defense of a misunderstood and maligned 
painter, undertaken in an essay, grew into a book, 
and then into other books, leading Ruskin into ever- 
widening fields of interest and literary production. 
The interpretation and criticism of art was the main 
occupation of his life up to i860. He was intermit- 
tently engaged upon Modern Painters for seventeen 
years, and he did not even then really complete the 
work. The first volume appeared in 1843; the second 
in 1846. Then came two works on architecture. 
The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, ^^^ ^^^ 
Stones of Venice^ in three volumes, 1 851-1853. The 
third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters were 
pubhshed in 1856, and the fifth and last in i860. In 
this year Ruskin's reputation, as Sir E. C. Cook, 
his biographer and editor, says, "stood probably at 
its highest point." In spite of severe criticisms upon 
his writings, many of them amply justified because of 
the paradoxes and dogmatisms which they contain, 
he was rightly regarded by the more judicious of his 
contemporaries as the man who had done more than 
any other to awaken the people of England to a feel- 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 135 

ing for art and beauty, and was exalted by his fellow 
writers as a master who, by his miraculous use of 
words, had wrought new splendors into the fabric of 
English prose. The younger artists, too, were capti- 
vated by him. Holman Hunt sat up most of a night 
reading a borrowed copy of Modern Painters, until 
the "echo of its words" remained an enchantment to 
his ears. William Morris and Burne-Jones hailed 
him as a "Luther of the Arts," and to groups of Ox- 
ford friends Morris spouted passages of his prose in a 
voice that fired his listeners with enthusiastic admi- 
ration. When the young Pre-Raphaelites were at- 
tacked in 1850 and 1851, Millais, in anger and despair, 
went to Ruskin, who at once wrote a letter to the 
Times m their defense, turning the tide in their favor; 
and who made generous offers for their pictures to 
Millais, Hunt, and Rossetti. Ruskin^s achievement 
had thus been in a high degree remarkable. At 
twenty-three, in an ecstacy of indignation, he had 
left his drawing and his mountain rambling to cham- 
pion a maligned reputation, with little thought of the 
way he was destined to go. At forty he stood upon 
the summit of his power and his fame, the author of 
more than a dozen books on painting and architecture, 
and an acknowledged interpreter of the beautiful in 
nature and art such as England had not hitherto 
produced. 

Then came a change. Ruskin now turned from a 
study of art to a study of society, and his reputation 
for a time collapsed. He has himself fixed 1 860 as the 
year of his apostasy. He had gone to Switzerland for 
rest after finishing the fifth volume of Modern Paint- 



( 



136 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ers. "I got this bound volume," he says, "in the 
Valley of St. Martin's in that summer, and in the 
Valley of Chamouni I gave up my art-work, and 
wrote this little book {Unto this Last)^ the beginning 
of the days of reprobation." ^ But the change which 
was announced to his astonished readers by the 
publication of some essays exclusively devoted to a 
discussion of social and economic problems had in 
reality been going on with increasing momentum for 
more than a decade. As far back as the earliest days 
of Modern Painters, when the Ruskin household 
received as guests the daughters (with their aristo- 
cratic husbands) of Mr. Domecq, Spanish partner in 
the wine trade, and the talk ran upon the manage- 
ment of the English market and the estates both in 
France and Spain, the surprised young author heard 
these foreign landlords speak "of their Spanish 
laborers and French tenantry, with no idea what- 
ever respecting them but that, except as producers 
by their labor of money to be spent in Paris, they 
were cumberers of the ground." These discussions, 
he says, "gave me the first clue to the real sources of 
wrong in the social laws of modern Europe; and led 
me necessarily into the political work which has been 
the most earnest of my life. ... It was already 
beginning to be, if not a question, at least a marvel to 
me, that these graceful and gay Andalusians, who 
played guitars, danced boleros, and fought bulls, 
should virtually get no good of their own beautiful 
country but the bunch of grapes or stalk of garlic 
they frugally dined on; that its precious wine was not 
^Worksy XXII, 512. 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 137 

for them, still less the money it was sold for; but the 
one came to crown our Vandalic feasts, and the other 
furnished our Danish walls with pictures, our Danish 
gardens with milk and honey, and five noble houses in 
Paris with the means of beautiful dominance in its 
Elysian fields/' ^ Not many years later, in 1847, 
during a tour in Scotland, Ruskin describes in a letter 
his distressed mood when seeing some fishermen at 
Dunbar. "I cannot understand how you merry 
people can smile through the world as you do. It 
seems to me a sad one — more suffering than pleasure 
in it, and less of hope than of either — at least if the 
interpretations set by the most pious people on the 
Bible be true, and if not, then worse still. But it is 
woeful to see these poor fishermen toiling all night 
and bringing in a few casks of herring each, twice a 
week or so, and lying watching their nets dry on the 
cliffs all day; their wives and children abused and 
dirty — scolding, fighting, and roaring through their 
unvarying lives. How much more enviable the sea- 
gulls that, all this stormy day, have been tossing 
themselves off and on the crags and winds like flakes 
of snow, and screaming with very joy." 2 

Gradually this sheltered student, this lover of blue 
hills and Turnerian visions, began to observe men as 
well as mountains and to note that however much the 
glory of God might be revealed in nature it was but 
dimly reflected in the works and ways of His human 
creatures. He saw luxury and misery, unabashed, 
developing side by side at a prodigious rate in the 
decade 1 848-1 858, and at times he became prey to 

1 Works, XXXV, 409. 2 Cook, Lije oj Ruskin, I, 214. 



138 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

moods of acute depression, when his own pursuit of 
art seemed to him not selfish merely, but utterly- 
useless. He was in France in 1848, the year of revo- 
lution, where he saw in the streets of Paris and Rouen 
mobs of dissipated and desperate people moving 
about as if ready to commit acts of violence, and he 
was deeply agitated. His letters from this time on 
contain reverberations of the inner disturbance and 
clearly indicate that the "passionate happiness" of 
earlier days was fast disappearing under pressure of 
new moods. Nothing in the personality of Ruskin is 
more significant than this late awakening to the 
tragic contrasts between the beauty of nature on the 
one hand, and the misery and folly of mankind on the 
other. Signs of this awakening are to be found with 
increasing frequency in every fresh book on art, 
excepting only the first volume of Modern Painters. 
His study of architecture in particular drew Ruskin 
further and further into social problems, and, as we 
shall see later, in his Stones of Venice he laid the 
foundation of all his social philosophy. In 1854 he 
began lecturing to drawing classes at the Working 
Men's College in London, where for the inaugural 
meeting a reprint of his chapter on Gothic in Stones 
had been distributed as a manifesto of the aims of the 
institution; and in 1857 he delivered two lectures at 
Manchester on the political economy of art, in which 
he attacked the laissez-faire economists within their 
own stronghold. In the light of these multiplying 
interests, which were more and more diverting him 
from art, it is easy for the student of Ruskin*s social 
philosophy to accept as the literal truth a confession 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 139 

which appears in the last volume of Modern Painters. 
His discussions of painters and pictures, he says, 
were "continually altered in shape, and even warped 
and broken, by digressions respecting social topics, 
which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the 
work I had been forced into undertaking" {i. e.y 
"forced" by his father to finish Modem Painters). 
"Nay," he says in a closing chapter, "I have many 
passages of history to examine, before I can determine 
the just limits of the hope in which I may permit 
myself to continue to labor in any cause of Art." ^ 

Ruskin's books on political economy are Unto This 
Last (i860 in magazine, 1862 in book); Munera 
Puheris (i 862-1 863 in magazine, 1872 in book); 
and Time and Tide, 1867. The first, which he called 
"that central book of my life" because it contains 
the substance of all that he had to say after i860, is 
a collection of four papers written in the solitude of 
the Alps and published in the Cornhill Magazine, of 
which Thackeray was then editor. The series was 
abruptly stopped with the fourth number, owing to 
the storm of protests from the reading public. ^ A 
like fate awaited Munera Puheris, composed of four 
articles which Froude, then editor of Frasers, was 
bold enough to accept, but which the publishers re- 
fused to continue. Time and Tide is a series of 
twenty-five letters to Thomas Dixon, a cork-cutter of 

1 Works y VII, 257, 423. 

2 The position of the editor, as well as the state of public opinion, is 
suggested in the following sentence from a letter of Ruskin's father: 
"John was obliged to put 'J. R.,' as the Editor would not be answerable 
for opinions so opposed to Malthus and the Times and the City of Man- 
chester." (Ruskin's Works y XVII, intro.y XXVI.) 



140 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Sunderland. They appeared in the Manchester 
Examiner and the Leeds Guardian^ and contained the 
fullest statement that Ruskin had yet made concern- 
ing social reform. With these three central books 
should also be included Sesame and Lilies (1865), 
Crown of Wild Olive (1866)5 most of which were first 
given to the public in the form of lectures; and that 
amazing congeries of Ruskiniana, Fors Clavigera^ a 
collection of ninety-six letters, appearing monthly, 
addressed "to the workmen and laborers of Great 
Britain." The first letter is dated January i, 1871, 
and the last, Christmas, 1884, — the whole therefore 
covering a period of thirteen years and including, 
amid a mass of digressions and personalia, a succes- 
sion of jeremiads on the shams and corruptions in 
modern life, besides many schemes and brilliant 
suggestions of social reconstruction.^ Sir E. C. Cook, 
Ruskin's biographer, in some extracts from the con- 
temporary press, has vividly suggested in what spirit 
the economic heresies of an art critic were accepted 
by the British public: "eruptions of windy hyster- 
ics,'' they were called, "intolerable twaddle," and 
"absolute nonsense," — with many other verbal 
amenities of like import. The reviews railed at him 
as a quixotic rhapsodist who had suddenly lost his 
head, as an intruder into an alien field where senti- 
mentalities were out of place. Friends withdrew from 
him in disgust. When Unto This Last appeared, 
Rossetti called it "bosh" and declared that Ruskin 

^ During these years, 1860-1880, Ruskin continued of course to write 
and lecture upon art; — he was Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford 
from 1870 to 1878, and again in 1883. But he rarely spoke about art 
without launching into long digressions on social questions. 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 141 

talked ''awful nonsense/* Ruskin himself wrote that 
people were now accustomed to hear him spoken of 
by artists as a " superannuated enthusiast," and by- 
philosophers and practical people as a ''delirious 
visionary." "As alone as a stone on a high glacier," 
is his description of himself to C. E. Norton in that 
period. As Mr. Frederic Harrison aptly suggests, 
Ruskin like Dante had found himself midway upon 
his life's journey "in a dark wood where straight the 
way was lost." 

Out of the darkness of those years almost the only 
voice of encouragement was the voice of Carlyle. 
Carlyle was not blind to the weaknesses of Ruskin: 
"sensitive," "flighty," "headlong," are some of the 
terms which he used to describe the impetuous vivac- 
ity of his disciple, in whom he undoubtedly missed a 
wholesome steadiness and robustness such as he 
found in the earlier Tennyson or in Browning. Nor 
did he unqualifiedly approve of all that Ruskin said 
and did. Some of the fantastic schemes set forth in 
the later numbers of Fors cooled his enthusiasm, and 
the St. George's Cpmpany he regarded as "utterly 
absurd," thinking it "a joke at first." But he recog- 
nized Ruskin's brilliant powers, — his "vivacity," his 
"high and pure morality," his "celestial brightness"; 
and he dedicated to him his last book. The Early 
Kings of Norway, in words that express the affection- 
ate regard which had grown up between master and 
disciple: "To my dear and ethereal Ruskin, whom 
God preserve. Chelsea, 4 May, 1875. T. Carlyle." 
Most of all Carlyle rejoiced in the bold frontal attacks 
that Ruskin was making upon the "dismal " science of 



142 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

political economy. "While all the world stands 
tremulous, shilly-shallying from the gutter/' he 
wrote, "impetuous Ruskin plunges his rapier up to 
the very hilt in the abominable belly of the vast block- 
headism, and leaves it staring very considerably." ^ 
"There is nothing going on among us," he wrote to 
Emerson, "as notable to me as those fierce lightning- 
bolts Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring 
into the black world of Anarchy all around him. No 
other man in England that I meet has in him the 
divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness 
that Ruskin has."^ He read the books on social and 
political economy as they appeared, and he ap- 
plauded their style and truth in a way that immensely 
heartened Ruskin, who of all men living reverenced 
Carlyle most. That a man who had "entirely blown 
up" the hoary conventions in the world of art should 
now turn his guns upon "half a million dull British 
heads," "the Dismal-Science people" included, was 
something to fire the weary patriarch of Chelsea 
with new hope.^ 

1 Froude, Life of Carlyle y IV, 280. 

2 Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, II, 388. 

3 Carlyle's comments on Ruskin's books are characteristic. After 
reading one of the chapters of Unto This Last, he wrote: "I have read 
your paper with exhilaration, exultation, often with laughter, with bra- 
vissimo! .... I marvel in parts at the lynx-eyed sharpness of your 
logic, at the pincer-grip (red-hot pincers) you take of certain bloated 
cheeks and blown-up bellies. ... If you dispose, stand to that kind of 
work for the next seven years, and work out then a result like what you 
have done in painting. . . . Meantime my joy is great to find myself 
henceforth in a minority of two, at aiw rate." (Ruskin, Works, XVII, 
intro. XXXIII.) Of Munera Ptt/z'^ri%|^e said: "In every part I find 
a high and noble sort of truth, not o^?doctrine that I can intrinsically 
dissent from, or count other than sah^ry in the extreme, and pressingly 
needed in England above all. . . |w There is a felicity of utterance in 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 143 

The precise time when Ruskin first met Carlyle has 
not been fixed, although it must have been as early as 
185O5 for in his journal of that year Carlyle made note 
of an evening call from Ruskin. During the years 
immediately following, although Ruskin was already 
a devoted worshiper of Carlyle and often visited the 
Carlyles at Cheyne Row/ their intercourse could 
not have been intimate, for the parents of Ruskin 
were fearful of the * perverting' influence of the older 
man who, they thought, was more than any one else 
responsible for leading their son "out of the way of 
fame — and into that of suffering." But after the 
death of John James Ruskin in 1864 and of Mrs. 
Carlyle in 1866, the two were drawn together into an 
almost uninterrupted relationship of mutual affection 
and admiration, — tempered on Ruskin's side with a 
profound veneration for the character and achieve- 
ment of one whom he now habitually looked up to as 
his master.2 

it, here and there, such as I remember in no other writer, living or dead, 
and it's all as true as gospel." (Ibid., LXX.) After finishing the fifth 
number of Fors, he wrote: "Every word of it as is spoken, not out of 
my poor heart only, but out of the eternal skies; words winged with 
Empyrean wisdom, piercing as lightning. . . . Continue, while you 
have such utterances in you, to give them voice." (Ibid., XXVII, intro. 
LXXXVI.) Carlyle was much struck with Ruskin's style, praising his 
"power of expression" again and again; e. g., "Passages of that last 
book, 'Queen of the Air,' went into my heart like arrows. . . . His 
description of the wings of birds the most beautiful things of the kind that 
can possibly be." 

^ Mrs. Carlyle once said : " No one managed Carlyle so well as Ruskin; 
it was quite beautiful to see him." Like many others Ruskin recognized 
the brilliancy of Mrs. Carlyle but did not like her sharp tongue. He 
once referred to her as a "shrew." 

2 There are characteristic touches of eflTusive sentiment on Ruskin's 
side: "I am your faithful and devoted son in the Florentine sense," 
he wrote in one of his almost daily letters from abroad to Carlyle in 



144 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Ruskin had felt the force of Carlyle's teaching in 
his early years, when the message of Sartor and Heroes 
had aroused him from a fit of uncertainty and made 
him resolve "to do something, to be something use- 
ful." Later on he read Past and Present, Latter-Day 
Pamphlets, and the histories, quoting repeatedly 
from them in his own books and referring to them 
and their creator in words that express the most 
enthusiastic appreciation. The "pure lightning*' of 
Carlyle's style and the "white-hot fire'* of energy 
and thought which it conveyed alike excited his 
wonder. The French Revolution and the Frederick 
the Great were to him "immortal" work done by 
"the greatest of historians since Tacitus." "All of 
your work is grandly done," he told Carlyle in 1871. 
The books that influenced him most, however, were 
Past and Present and Latter-Day Pamphlets. The 
first he evidently read and reread, for when he gave 
away his "much scored" copy to a friend he wrote: 
"I have sent you a book which I read no more be- 
cause it has become a part of myself, and my old 
marks in it are now useless, because in my heart I 
mark it all." In the tenth Fors Ruskin recommended 
the reading of this much loved book to workingmen 
in these words: "Now, I tell you once for all, Carlyle 
is the only living writer who has spoken the absolute 
and perpetual truth about yourselves and your 

1874. "Ever your most loving disciple," he wrote on another occasion. 
C. E. Norton entertained the two together at luncheon in 1872: "Each 
was delightful with the other, and each so perfectly at ease, so entirely 
free from self-consciousness of any disagreeable sort, so devoid of arro- 
gance or disposition to produce false effect, each also was so full of humor 
and of thought, that the talk was of the best ever heard." {Letters of 
Norton, I, 441.) 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 145 

business. . . . Read your Carlyle, then, with all 
your heart.*' Upon the subject of social and political 
reform, he came to the conclusion that in these two 
books, together with Sartor^ Carlyle had "said all 
that needs to be said, and far better than I shall 
ever say it again. "^ 

^Cf. "I've been reading Latter-Days again, chiefly 'Jesuitism.' I 
can't think what Mr. Carlyle wants me to write anything more for — if 
people don't attend to that, what more is to be said? {Letters, 1,428.) 
Ruskin's appreciations of Carlyle are almost too numerous to quote, and 
yet the perusal of them greatly strengthens the reader's conviction of the 
intimate relationship existing between the two men. "What can you say 
of Carlyle," said Ruskin to Froude, "but that he was born in the clouds 
and struck by lightning?" . . . "The greatest of our English thinkers 
. . . our one quite clear-sighted thinker, Carlyle." Ruskin spoke of the 
"mighty interests — its measureless pathos" of Carlyle's Reminiscences. 
He was on the side of Froude, not of Norton, in the literary row that was 
stirred up over the publications following Carlyle's death, and Froude 
regarded him as the "only person to whom I can talk about Carlyle." 
(Cook, Life of Ruskin, II, 505-6.) Ruskin in fact read Carlyle "so con- 
stantly, that, without wilfully setting myself to imitate him, I find myself 
perpetually falling into his modes of expression, and saying many things 
in a 'quite other,' and I hope, stronger, way, than I should have adopted 
some years ago. ... So that I find Carlyle's stronger thinking coloring 
mine continually. " (Ruskin, Works, V, 427-8.) 

Of all the expressions of reverent appreciation that Ruskin avowed, the 
following in which he urges Carlyle to a final work after the Frederick is 
perhaps the best: "It seems to me," he wrote October i, 1866, "that a 
magnificent closing work for you to do would be to set your finger on the 
turning points and barriers in European history, to gather them into 
train of light, — to give without troubling yourself about detail or proof, 
your own final impression of the courses and causes of things — and your 
thoughts of the leading men, who they were, and what they were. If you 
like to do this, I'll come and write for you a piece every day, if after 
beginning it you still found the mere hand work troublesome. I have a 
notion it would be very wholesome work for me, and it would be very 
proud and dear for me." {Works, XXXVI, 518; cf. also 526.) In his own 
closing days when his work was nearly over, Ruskin had plans of writing 
about Carlyle. For one thing he proposed to collect and edit Carlyle's 
descriptions of people {ibid., XXXVII, 568) ; for another, he thought of 
writing a small volume, as Cook says, " partly to vindicate, and partly to 
supplement Froude." {Ihid., XXXV, intra. XXIV.) 



146 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

The influence of Carlyle upon Ruskin, therefore, 
particularly after i860, was both continuous and 
powerful.^ Accordingly when in 1872 Ruskin dedi- 
cated his Munera Pulveris "to the friend and guide 
who has urged me to all chief honor, Thomas Car- 
lyle," he was stating the literal truth.* For as the 
ethical and social interests gained ascendancy over 
the aesthetic in Ruskin, he was increasingly conscious 
of many links of sympathy between himself and his 
master. The similarities in the two men at this 
period are more striking than the differences. Both 
rested all their teaching on art, history, and life upon 
facty as they liked to call it.^ They sought to pierce 
through the shows and shams to the solid ground of 
eternal veracity beneath; and to show that it was in 
this soil alone, in the deep heart of our common 
humanity, that beauty and truth and goodness must 
have their roots if they were to live and flourish. 
Hence they could not tolerate a spirit of pretense or 
levity anywhere, and they were suspicious of any- 
thing in art or life that seemed to be created merely 
for amusement. Both believed in reverence, rever- 

1 As early as 1854 Ruskin in a lecture publicly acknowledged that he 
owed more to Carlyle than to any other writer. (Works, XII, 507.) In 
1855 Ruskin wrote to Carlyle: "How much your general influence has 
told upon me, I know not, but I always confess it, or rather boast of it, in 
conversation about you." {Ibid., XXXVI, 184.) Twenty-five years 
later he wrote to Miss Susan Beever: "We feel so much alike that 
you may often mistake one for the other now." (Ibid., XXXVII, 
320.) 

2 In a letter to Froude (1873) Ruskin said: "I am not the institutor, 
still less the guide — but I am the Exponent of the Reaction for Veracity 
in Art which corresponds partly to Carlyle's and your work in 
History, and partly to Linnaeus's in natural science. " (JForksy XXXVII, 
83.) 



MASTER AND DISCIPLE 147 

ence for the fundamental facts of life as well as for 
superior men; and Ruskin was as truly a hero- wor- 
shiper as Carlyle. Both stood staunchly for a gospel 
of work and held that the foundation of all religion 
is "in resolving to do our work well." Each had the 
same invincible and simple faith in the plain dictates 
of conscience, insisting that right is right and wrong is 
wrong in spite of the sophistications of dilettanti 
and wiseacres, and that "courage and chastity and 
honesty and patience bring out good; and cowardice 
and luxury and folly and impatience, evil." Ruskin, 
like Carlyle, reduced everything that he taught to 
the simple proposition that man has within him " that 
singular force anciently called a soul." Consequently 
they had much the same view and temper towards 
modern science, which, they thought, took the mys- 
tery out of things and was arrogant and assuming in 
its pretensions. Finally, they both looked backward 
to a medieval age for suggestions of a new social 
order; and, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, 
they thought and preached alike upon many of the 
fundamental principles of social reconstruction. In 
the light of these many affinities, therefore, both in 
ideas and accomplishments, we can appreciate the 
accuracy of Ruskin's statement, when he spoke of 
Carlyle as having led in an attack upon the English 
Dagon, and of himself as merely fulfilling what Car- 
lyle had already begun. 1 The truth was exactly ex- 
pressed by Froude, who knew well both master and 
disciple, when he said: "Ruskin seemed to be catch- 
ing the fiery cross from (Carlyle's) hand, as his own 
strength was failing." The new chivalry of labor was 



148 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

thus to be championed by one who was more of a 
medievalist than Carlyle, and who, like a knight-er- 
rant of old time, went out alone into the wilderness of 
the modern world to slay the dragons and to restore 
the haunts of man to their ancient peace. 



CHAPTER V 

THE APOSTLE OF ART AND THE 
MODERN WORLD 

"The first schools of beauty must be the streets of your 
cities, and the chief of our fair designs niust be to keep the 
Hving creations round us clean and in human comfort. . . . 
Beautiful art can only be produced by people who have 
beautiful things about them, and leisure to look at them." 
— Ruskin. 

Casual readers of Ruskin have been puzzled to 
account for his apostacy from art to political econ- 
omy. How was it, they ask, that one who could write 
eloquent rhapsodies about clouds and skies, about 
flowers and trees and mountains and all manner of 
living things, who could translate the golden visions 
of Turner into language that can only be compared 
with Shelley's in its ethereal splendor, whose ex- 
traordinarily sensitive nature was habitually thrilled 
by the glories of form and color alike in the world of 
nature and the world of art, — how was it that a 
writer with magic like this at his command should 
torment his spirit with thoughts of competition and 
co-operation, profit and loss, production, distribution, 
consumption, and all the dull lingo of the world of 
industry and commerce? Contemporaries of Ruskin 
were likewise puzzled over this question, and they 
turned upon him in derision and contempt, as we 
have seen. But a careful study of his work reveals a 

149 



I50 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

unity of purpose underneath a wide diversity of 
interests. In spite of the digressions — and they are 
legion — there is one principal aim in his voluminous 
writings, from Modern Painters to ForSy and it is this: 
that sound art, whether individual or national, is the 
expression of a sound life and depends for its noble- 
ness and truth upon a noble spirit in the artist or in 
the age; and, further, that art, so understood, is not 
possible when it is thought of as a mere luxury 
created by a few highly gifted and highly paid vir- 
tuosos for the enjoyment of an aristocratic order 
alone, but only when it is conceived as the creative 
expression of a people, working, from humblest crafts- 
man up to master artist, in response to impulses 
that spring from a happy and healthy community life. 
In his inaugural lecture at Oxford which he delivered 
in 1870 as the first professor of fine arts, Ruskin 
summarized his teaching in the following words: 
"the most perfect mental culture possible to men is 
founded on their useful energies, and their best arts 
and brightest happiness are consistent, and consistent 
only, with their virtue." It is necessary, he said, to 
find "in the laws which regulate the finest industries, 
the clue to the laws which regulate all industries. . . . 
The art of any country is the exponent of its social and 
political virtues r This, he explained to his audience, 
"is what I chiefly have to say to you, — one of the 
things, and the most important of all things, I can 
positively declare to you."^ His doctrine of art is 
thus the root from which grew his social and economic 
ideals. Industry was inseparably connected with art 

1 Works, XX, 39-40. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 151 

in all his thinking. A brief analysis will make this 
clear. 

Ruskin defined the art of man as " the expression 
of his rational and disciplined delight in the forms and 
laws of the creation of which he forms a part." Art 
is man's sense of beauty awakened and made creative. 
But what is beauty? Beauty, said Ruskin, is a 
special kind of pleasure communicated to man from 
the outer world, perceived first by the physical senses 
and then by the moral sense, or heart. "Any ma- 
terial object which can give us pleasure in the simple 
contemplation of its outward qualities without any 
direct or definite exertion of the intellect, I call in 
some way, or in some degree, beautiful." ^ This is 
sensuous beauty, or " that quality or group of quali- 
ties in objects by which they become pleasant to the 
eye considered merely as a sense. Pure and vivid 
colors, for instance, are to the eye precisely what 
musical sounds are to the ear, capable of intense 
expression, but also pleasant in themselves, and 
although wearisome if too long continued, possessing 
for a time a real charm, of which no account whatever 
can be rendered, but that the bodily sense is therein 
gratified. This is the first notion of beauty in the 
human mind." ^ But Ruskin did not stop here. He 
held that there is in material things a quality which 
conveys an idea of immaterial ones, that, for example, 
bright distance, curvature, or color gradation, is a 
type or reflection of infinity in the divine mind, just 
as material purity is a type of divine energy. This 
quality, which is essential to a complete notion of 

^Worksy III, 109. ^Ibid.y IV, 365. 



\ 



152 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

beauty, can be fully apprehended only by the moral 
nature, or heart, " in its purity and perfection." ^ " As 
it is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty," 
said Ruskin, "that the sensual pleasure which may 
be its basis should be accompanied first with joy, 
then with love of the object, then with the perception 
of kindness in a superior intelligence, finally, with 
thankfulness and veneration towards that intelligence 
itself; and as no idea can be at all considered in any 
way an idea of beauty, until it be made up of these 
emotions, any more than we can be said to have an 
idea of a letter of which we perceive the perfume and 
the fair writing, without understanding the contents 
of it; and as these emotions are in no way resultant 
from, or obtainable by, any operation of the Intellect; 

1 Ruskin regarded this ** moral" aspect of beauty as the central feature 
of his theory of aesthetics, and to distinguish the faculty by which it is 
received from the merely sensuous nature of man, he took a hint from 
Aristotle and called it ^'theoretic." Theoria in Aristotle's Ethics means 
contemplation; and from this work Ruskin quotes a passage which, he 
says, "seems to have suggested the whole idea of my own essay" {i. e.. 
Volume II of Modern Painters), and which he translated as follows: 
"And perfect happiness is some sort of energy of Contemplation, for all 
the life of the gods is (therein) glad; and that of men, glad in the degree in 
which some likeness to the gods in this energy belongs to them. For none 
other of living creatures (but men only) can be happy, since in no way can 
they have any part in Contemplation." (Works, IV, 7.) Thirty years 
after the publication of the second volume of Modern Painters, in an 
unused letter written for Fors from Italy, he wrote: "Among the points 
of true value in the first and second volumes of Modern Painters, none were 
more vital than the distinction made between ordinary sight, and what — 
there being no English word for it — I was forced to call by the Greek one 
' Theoria,* ' Contemplation* — seeing within the temple of the heart. . . . 
If you will look back to the chapters in Theoria in Modern Painters, you 
will see that the entire difference between the human sight of beauty and 
the animal scorn of it is shown to consist, in this concurrence, with 
physical sense, of Mental Religion. I use the word in its true 
meaning — the acknowledgment of Spiritual Power." (Works, XXIX, 
S7S-7') 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 153 

it is evident that the sensation of beauty is not sen- 
sual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the 
other, but is dependent on a pure, right, and open 
state of the heart." ^ In the light of this account, 
beauty is not a mere pleasurable sensation of the eye 
or ear; it is rather a passionate and reverent joy ex- 
cited in a pure mind by its contemplation of the ex- 
ternal world of man and nature. It cannot be felt by 
mean and low spirits, nor by highly refined spirits in 
mean and low moments. "So much as there is in you 
of ox, or swine," said Ruskin, "perceives no beauty, 
and creates none: what is human in you, in exact 
proportion to the perfection of its humanity, can 
create it, and receive." ^ **Yes," we say, ^*but what 
of the licentious artists who are at once gifted and 
debased and who can yet create beautiful things? 
How absurd to contend that beauty depends upon 
morality!" Beauty, which is a good thing, Ruskin 
would reply, cannot come from vileness, which is an 
evil thing. "A bad woman may have a sweet voice; 
but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality 
of her race. ... A maiden may sing of her lost love, 
but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And with 
absolute precision, from highest to lowest, the fineness 
of the possible art is an index of the moral purity and 
majesty of the emotion it expresses, ... All aesthetics 
depend on the health of soul and body, and the proper 
exercise of both, not only through years, but genera- 

1 Worksy IV, 48. By saying that the perception of beauty is not an 
intellectual activity, Ruskin means that such perception does not depend 
upon the combining powers of the imagination or the analytic powers of 
the reason. 

2 Ihid,, XX, 209. 



154 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

tions. Only by harmony of both collateral and suc- 
cessive lives can the great doctrine of the Muses be 
received which enables men 'xelpetv op6ay;\ * to have 
pleasure rightly.' " * 

The full perception of beauty is thus conditioned 
upon a sound state of man's moral nature. And the 
primal source of greatness in art is accordingly the 

1 Works XIX, 393; XX, 74, 208. It would be possible to quote scores 
of passages from Ruskin in illustration of this fundamental dogma. His 
ethical interpretation of beauty no doubt owes much to his personal' 
experience. The world of nature to Ruskin as to Wordsworth was appar- 
elled in celestial light. His first sight of the Alps was like a direct revela- 
tion of heaven. In the midst of mountain solitudes, his soul was elevated 
to a solemn ecstasy and the very atmosphere seemed to thrill with the 
spirit of God. "I never climbed any mountain, alone," he said, "without 
kneeling down, by instinct, on its summit to pray." (fForks, IV, 350.) 
"Whatever might be my common faults or weaknesses, they were rebuked 
among the hills; and the only days I can look back to as, according to 
the powers given me, rightly or wisely, in entireness spent, have been in 
sight of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, or the Jungfrau. " {Works, XXXV, 474. 
Cf. Tolstoi's experience on seeing the Caucasus mountains for the first 
time, as described in the second chapter of his Cossacks.) Ruskin believed 
that the "color in the sky, the trees, flowers, and colored creatures round 
us, and in our own various arts massed under the one name of painting 
(has) a directly ethical influence" upon man, if he will give himself up to its 
appeals. "Color . . . is the purifying or sanctifying element of material 
beauty ... It is just as divine and distinct in its power as music," and 
"more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of purpose. . . . 
It is with still greater interest and reverence to be noted as a physical 
truth that in states of joyful and healthy excitement the eye becomes 
more highly sensitive to the beauty of color, and especially to the blue 
and red rays, while in depression and disease all color becomes dim to us, 
and the yellow rays prevail over the rest, even to the extremity of jaun- 
dice." The "love of beauty is an essential part of all human nature, and 
though it can long co-exist with states of life in many other respects 
unvirtuous, it is in itself wholly good; — the direct adversary of envy, 
avarice, mean wordly care, and especially of cruelty. It entirely perishes 
when these are wilfully indulged. . . . In the worst condition of sensual- 
ity there is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that man utterly 
depraved in principle and habits of thought, will yet admire beautiful 
things, and fair faces." (Works, XX, 210; VII, 4i7n.; XI, 218; VII, 
4i8n; XXXIII, 386; XX, 90; IV, 320.) 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 155 

soul of the artist. Great art is a noble spirit in the 
artist communicated to his material. Not in tech- 
nique alone, not in a way of handling details, not in 
the facts of nature considered by themselves, indis- 
pensable as all these are, is to be found the secret of 
greatness in art. "Great art," Ruskin said, "is 
produced, by men who feel acutely and nobly. . . . 
Great art is precisely that which never was, nor will 
be taught; it is pre-eminently and finally the expres- 
sion of the spirits of great men." ^ An accomplished 
technician may paint with perfect accuracy a group of 
gamblers in their den, but no one but a truly refined 
artist will render the beauty of a fair countenance 
or the glory of an evening sky; for while a mean 
intellect will be occupied with mean objects, only a 
noble nature will correctly interpret noble objects. 
Objects, moreover, are not represented in the form 
of pure transcript from nature. "They invariably 
receive the reflection of the mind under whose 
shadow they have passed, and are modified or colored 
by its image." 

These most Ruskinian of Ruskin's dogmas on art 
have been much misunderstood, and much ridiculed 
as the enthusiasms of a pious sentimentalist, who 
talked about pictures in the spirit of the preacher 
rather than of the critic. But Ruskin never advanced 
the fatuous notion that an ignoramus could be an 
artist merely because he might happen to be virtuous; 
nor did he confound a large and noble morality with a 
narrow and orthodox piety. No one could rate en- 
dowment higher than he. "Great men," he said, 

1 Works^ II, 32, 69. 



156 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

"always understand at once that the first morality of 
a painter, as of everybody else, is to know his busi- 
ness. . . . Art-gift and amiability of disposition are 
two different things; a good man is not necessarily a 
painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply an 
honest mind. But great art implies the union of both 
powers: it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure 
soul. If the gift is not there, we have no art at all; 
and if the soul — and a right soul too — is not there, the 
art is bad, however dexterous." ^ Goodness, it is to be 
noted, is nearly always identified by Ruskin with 
manhood, with a man*s full humanity, and implies no 
particular creed or practice in religion or morals. 
"All art is great, and good, and true," he said, "only 
so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its 
entire and highest sense. ... All great art is the 
work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and 
chiefly of the soul." An artist's greatness, he said 
further, in a striking passage, "is in his choice of 
things, in his analysis of them, and his combining 
powers involve the totality of his knowledge in life. His 
methods of observation and abstraction are essential 
habits of his thought^ conditions of his being'' 2 

These laws, interpreting the relation between art 
and its creator, are just as true for the nation or the 
race, as for the individual. A national art is an 
accurate expression of the life and temper of the 
nation that produced it. From the least to the great- 
est, the arts spring from the whole humanity, debased 

"^ Works y XX, 81; XIX, 392. Ruskin's position is stated many times 
over. C/. XV, 416. The whole matter is most clearly and eloquently set 
forth in a long passage, from which the second quotation above is taken. 

2 Ihid.y XI, 201, 212; XIX, 34. The italics are mine. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 157 

by its vices, elevated by its virtues. "The art of a 
nation/* said Ruskin, "much resembles the corolla of 
a flower; its brightness of color is dependent on the 
general health of the plant, and you can only com- 
mand the hue, or modify the form of the blossom, by 
medicine or nourishment applied patiently to the 
root, not by manipulation of the petals/* ^ The 
characteristics of a people, he contended, are written 
more legibly in its art than in any other expression of 
Its activity. "You may read the characters of men, 
and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror. . . . The 
higher arts, which involve the action of the whole 
intellect, tell the story of the entire national char- 
acter." 2 Find on the map of the world or in the his- 
tory of the past a nation famous for its humanity as 
well as for its love of beauty, and if it has produced 
art at all, that art is a reflection of its national char- 
acteristics no less distinctly than the sculptures of 
Michael Angelo are a reflection of his superb power 
and dignity as a man. Wherever Ruskin turned to 
study the art of a people, he accordingly found an 
authentic record of its temper: he found written in 
stone or upon canvas the soldiership of early Greece, 
the sensuality of late Italy, the visionary religion of 
Tuscany, and the splendid human energy of Venice; 
for "all good art is the natural utterance of its own 
people in its own day." ^ 

The fullest expression of this principle that Ruskin 
found was architecture, — "the beginning of arts" 
and "pre-eminently the art of the multitude," ^ not 

1 Worksy XIX, 197. 3 Ibid., XIX, 418. 

2 Ibid.y XIX, 389; 250. 4 iBid,^ VIII, 2ss; XI, 118. 



158 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

only in its influence upon people in their daily life and 
interests, but as an expression of their common 
creative energy. In their buildings, domestic, civil, 
or ecclesiastical, they give visible evidence of their 
national spirit, their love of home, their civic pride, 
their religious aspiration. Unlike paintings or pieces 
of statuary, architecture cannot be withdrawn into 
the privacy of palace or mansion for the enjoyment of 
the few; and so, more richly than any other form of 
art, it expresses " to all the world the taste, and there- 
fore the character, of the people by whom it has been 
created." Ruskin's two books on architecture were 
written with no other purpose than to set forth the 
closeness of relation between architecture and the 
spirit of the people that produced it. "The book I 
called The Seven Lamps was to show that certain 
right states of temper and moral feeling were the 
magic powers by which all good architecture, without 
exception, has been produced. The Stones of Venice 
had, from beginning to end, no other aim than to 
show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had 
arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state 
of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and 
that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, 
and in all its features indicated, a state of concealed 
national infidelity, and of domestic corruption." ^ 
Every national architecture that he saw or studied 
was to Ruskin an illustration of the principles thus 
clearly stated. The spirit of the Roman people was 
revealed in "the magnificent vaultings of the aque- 
duct and bath, and the colossal heaping of the rough 

^ Works, XVIII, 443. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 159 

stones in the arches of the amphitheatre; an archi- 
tecture full of expression of gigantic power and 
strength of will." In the "extravagant foliation and 
exquisite refinement" of his pointed arches the Arab 
displayed unmistakably his intense love of excite- 
ment and his supple energy; just as the Lombard and 
the Norman gave evidence of their "savage but noble 
life gradually subjected to law" in the round arches 
and massive pillars of their buildings, ornamented 
with "endless imagery of active life and fantastic 
superstitions." Most expressive of all, because most 
truly and widely national, was Gothic architecture, 
the style that Ruskin loved best. In this "magnifi- 
cently human" art, especially in the northern Gothic 
of France and England, he found the noble character- 
istics of multitudes of unnamed workmen legibly 
written upon the stones which they had shaped into 
infinite variations of pointed arch, grouped shaft, or 
intricate tracery. Here were visibly recorded their 
independence, fortitude, resolution, impatience, free- 
dom, habitual tenderness, enthusiasm, and profound 
sympathy with the wealth of beauty in the material 
world. Gothic, too, was a democratic architecture, 
created not for knights and nobles, nor for baronial 
halls and sanctuaries, alone, but for the people, for 
their houses, their shops, and their places of com- 
merce; it was good for all, enjoyed by all, and "had 
fellowship with all hearts, and was universal like 
nature." Then, because the people became money- 
loving and faithless, because they no longer delighted 
in art except as a minister to their pride and luxury, 
there grew up in Europe another architecture, called 



i6o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the Renaissance. This, just as accurately as the 
Gothic, was a witness of the character of its creators. 
It was aristocratic and cold, a type of building made 
for men of intellect and position, "for the academy 
and the court; — princes delighted in it, and cour- 
tiers." More and more it served the uses and the 
interests of an aristocratic society, until in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it became 
associated with "the terraced and scented and grot- 
toed garden, with its trickling fountains and slum- 
brous shades," attaining "its utmost height" in the 
palace of Versailles, the perfect symbol of a haughty 
and degenerate nobility. 

It is clear, then, that Ruskin found in architecture 
the best possible illustration of his doctrine that the 
art of a nation is the exponent of its social and 
political life, and that a noble architecture, such as 
the Gothic, sprang from a sound and noble national 
existence. But his study of Gothic revealed to him 
many supplementary lessons concerning the relation 
of art to society, which he held and advocated with 
increasing conviction as he grew older. It taught him 
that to be truly great an art must be the flowering of 
the creative effort of a whole people. Such an art 
must be the product of many noble artists, small as 
well as great, guided by a universal style, and work- 
ing together towards certain large common ends.^ 
Gothic taught him, further, that a fully nationalized 

i"The very essence of a Style, properly so called, is that it should be 
practised /or ag^j-, and applied to all purposes; and that so long as any 
given style is in practice, all that is left for individual imagination to 
accomplish must be within the scope of that style, not in the invention of 
a new one." {Works, XVI, 349.) 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD i6i 

art comes only when the enjoyment of it is universal, 
and when the people who create it are living happily 
in an ordered and beautiful environment. "There is 
no way of getting good art/* he said, "but one — at 
once the simplest and most difficult — to enjoy it." 
Ruskin did not believe in an art that was aristocratic 
and therefore exclusive, that was individual and 
therefore eccentric. "In all base schools of Art," he 
said, "the craftsman is dependent for his bread on 
originality; that is to say, on finding in himself some 
fragment of isolated faculty, by which his work may 
be recognized as different from that of other men. . . 
In all great schools of art these conditions are exactly 
reversed. An artist is praised in these, not for what 
is different from him in others, nor for solitary per- 
formance of singular work; but only for doing most 
strongly what all are endeavoring; and for contribut- 
ing, in the measure of his strength, to some great 
achievement, to be completed by the unity of multi- 
tudes, and the sequence of ages." ^ Ruskin was en- 
gaged all his life, to use his own words, "in an ardent 
endeavor to spread the love and knowledge of art 
among all classes. . . . The end of my whole Pro- 
fessorship," he said, when speaking of his work as 
Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, "would be 
accomplished, — and far more than that, — if only 
the English nation could be made to understand that 
the beauty which is indeed to be a joy forever, must 
be a joy for allT ^ 

1 Works y III, 665; XXII, 212. C/. "Not only sculpture, but all the 
other fine arts, must be for all the people." (XX, 299.) "All great art 
must be popular." (XXII, 317.) 

2 Ihid, XXII, 145. 



i62 CARLYLE AND RUSKiN 

But, in keeping with Ruskin's belief in the depend- 
ence of sound art upon sound life, his demand for an 
art widely diffused over the whole of society im- 
poses tremendous claims upon the people who are to 
create it. They must first create beauty of surround- 
ings and beauty of life. "Design is not the offspring 
of idle fancy," said Ruskin, in one of his clearest 
utterances on this point; "it is the studied result 
of accumulative observation and delightful habit. 
Without observation and experience, no design — 
without peace and pleasurableness in occupation, no 
design — and all the lecturings, and teachings, and 
prizes, and principles of art, in the world, are of no 
use, so long as you don't surround your men with 
happy influences and beautiful things. It is impossible 
for them to have right ideas about color, unless they 
see lovely colors in nature unspoiled; impossible for 
them to supply beautiful incident and action in their 
ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and 
action in the world about them. Inform their minds, 
refine their habits, and you form and refine their 
designs. . . . The elements of character necessary 
for the production of true formative art will be, first, 
brightness of physical life, and the manly virtues 
belonging to it; then the broad scope of reflection and 
purpose; then the distinctive gift of imagination; the 
innocent perception of beauty; to crown all, the per- 
fect peace of an honest and living faith. All this is 
needed in the nature of the artist himself; and yet it is 
not enough. Endowed with all these attributes, or at 
least capable of them, he may still be made helpless 
by the lower conditions of persons and things around 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 163 

him. For it is necessary to his healthy energy that 
his subject should always be greater than himself. 
He must not stoop to it, but be exalted by it, and 
paint it with full strain of his force looking upward. 
It is fatal to his strength, to his honor, if he is always 
raising mean things and gilding defiled. He has 
always the privilege, is often under the necessity, of 
modifying, or choosing, or contracting his subject, 
within assigned limitations of manners; but he must 
always feel that the whole, out of which he has 
chosen, could he have rendered it, was greater and 
more beautiful than the part he chose, and that the 
free fact was greater than his formalism. And there- 
fore it is necessary that the living men round him 
should be in an ethical state harmonious with his own, 
and that there should be no continual discord nor 
dishonor standing between him and the external 
world. And thus a lovely and ordered unity of civil 
life is necessary to fulfil the power of the men who are 
raised above its level; such unity of life as expresses 
itself palpably and always in the states capable of 
formative design by their consenting adaptation of a 
common style of architecture for their buildings, and 
of more or less fixed standards of form in domestic 
furniture and in dress. . . . We shall never make 
our houses for the rich beautiful, till we have begun 
by making our houses for the poor beautiful. As it is 
a common and diflfused pride, so it is a common and 
diffused delight on which alone our future arts can be 
founded." ^ 

Common and diffused delights! Beautiful objects 
1 Worksy XVI, 341; XIX, 184, 266. 



1 64 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

and beautiful incidents! A lovely and ordered unity 
of civil life! Artists with happy human creatures 
round them in an ethical state harmonious with their 
own ! Ruskin's study of art had indeed led him far. 
Passionate lover of the beautiful, passionate believer 
in the dependence of beauty upon a right state of the 
heart, passionate prophet of the contented craftsman- 
ship that once throve in medieval communities of 
cathedral builders, he clung with his whole intense 
nature to the faith that art in its highest and health- 
iest form could flourish only when happiness was the 
possession not of the few, but of the many, the posses- 
sion of a people living well-ordered lives in a beautiful 
environment. His first sight of the Alps and of 
Italian cities had come to him before the advent of 
modern industrialism, when the skies were unsullied 
with smoke-clouds and the marbles of Venice and 
Verona yet shone with something of their ancient 
luster, unspoiled by the hand of the restorer. In- 
spired poet rather than sober rationalist, he had seen 
the splendors of nature and of art before his eyes were 
troubled with the new order springing up about him. 
He had grown accustomed to regard beauty, which 
was to him a revelation of the glory and goodness of 
God and which therefore was fully unveiled only to 
the pure in heart, as the symbol of a peaceful and 
contented society in the past, and as the promise 
of a noble fellowship of men in the future. With 
a mind full of such visions and faiths, with a 
heart inflamed with hope, buoyant and sensitive 
as a poet, he now turned to look upon the mod- 
ern world that had grown up as if by miracle 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 165 

while he was absorbed in following the footprints ojf 
Turner. 

What Ruskin saw was a sight familiar enough to- 
day but wholly new to him, a sight that filled him 
with horror. He saw that however eloquently the 
heavens might declare the glory of God, the cities of 
men and their habitations were now subject to 
another power, the demon of disorder and ugliness, of 
grime and squalor and noise. "The vastness of the 
horror of this world's blindness and misery opens 
upon me," he wrote to C. E. Norton in 1862 from the 
little Alpine village of Mornex, where he was writing 
the essays that afterwards appeared as Munera Pul- 
veris. The ugliness of this new era, which took 
beauty from the sky and clearness from the streams 
and which spread dreary acres of monotonous dwel- 
lings over the faces of cities, he described in his later 
books with the fierceness of Swift and the atrabil- 
iar exaggeration of Carlyle, without, alas, Carlyle's 
Teufelsdrochkian humor. The language that he 
sometimes employed reminds one in its uncontrolled 
intensity and extravagance of the speech of Milton 
or Burke, in moments when their wrath overcame 
their reason. For Ruskin wrote, as he expressed it, 
with " a sense of indignation which burns in me con- 
tinually, for all that men are doing and suflFering." 
He wrote, too, with a discontent which he likened to 
that of Dante and Virgil. It seemed to him as if the 
peace and beauty, "the integrity and simplicity," of 
an older order was being trampled down by a people 
who lived in tenements instead of homes, and who 
substituted "mechanism for skill, photograph for 



1 66 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

picture, cast-iron for sculpture." After a long drive 
through the midland manufacturing districts of 
England, he wrote: "The two most frightful things 
I have ever yet seen in my life are the southeastern 
suburb of Bradford (six miles long), and the scene 
from Wakefield bridge, by the chapel." ^ Could 
beauty live in a pestilence like this? "I know per- 
fectly," he said, "that to the general people, trained 
in the midst of the ugliest objects that vice can de- 
sign, in houses, mills, and machinery, all beautiful 
form and color is as invisible as the seventh heaven. 
... In literal and fatal instance of fact — think what 
ruin it is for men of any sensitive faculty to live in 
such a city as London is now! Take the highest 
and lowest state of it: you have, typically, Grosvenor 
Square, — an aggregation of bricks and railings, with 
not so much architectural faculty expressed in the 
whole cumber of them as there is in a wasp's nest or a 
worm-hole; — and you have the rows of houses which 
you look down into on the south side of the South- 
western line, between Vauxhall and Clapham Junc- 
tion. Between these two ideals the London artist 
must seek his own; and in the humanity, or the ver- 
min, of them, worship the aristocratic and scientific 
gods of living Israel. ... Is this verily the end at 
which we aim, and will the mission of the age have 
been then only accomplished, when the last castle 
has fallen from our rocks, the last cloisters faded from 
our valleys, the last streets, in which the dead have 
dwelt, been effaced from our cities, and regenerated 
society is left in luxurious possession of towns com- 
1 Works, XXVIII, 267. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 167 

posed only of bright saloons, overlooking gay par- 
terres? . . . Must this little Europe — this corner of 
our globe, gilded with the blood of old battles, and 
gray with the temples of all pieties — this narrow 
piece of the world's pavement, worn down by so 
many pilgrims* feet, be utterly swept and garnished 
for the masque of the future?'*^ Readers familiar 
with his later writings know how repeatedly Ruskin 
drew these graphic pictures, for he could not dismiss 
from his mind these scenes of a newer world which his 
acute sensibilities were constantly impressing upon it 
and which contradicted all his hopes for art. 

It was not the ugliness of the industrialism only 
that appalled him. Even more it was the luxury and 
the misery, the lust of money and the injustice, which 
went with the ugliness and were both cause and con- 
sequence. "The extremities of human degradation," 
Ruskin said, "are not owing to natural causes; but to 
the habitual preying upon the labor of the poor by 
the luxury of the rich." 2 In the severest language he 
condemned the tendencies of the times that had their 
root in these conditions, — the furious pursuit of 

1 Works, XXII, 473; XXXIII, 398; XII, 429. 

2 Ibid., XXVIII, 374. Ruskin printed in Fors an extract from a con- 
temporary paper (the Builder for August 25, 1877) in part to the follow- 
ing effect: "Five men own one-fourth of Scotland, One duke owns 96,000 
acres in Derbyshire, besides vast estates in other parts of England and in 
Ireland, Another, with estates all over the United Kingdom, has 40,000 
acres in Sussex and 300,000 acres in Scotland, This nobleman's park is 
fifteen miles in circumference! Another duke has estates which the 
highroad divides for twenty-three miles! A marquis there is who can ride 
a hundred miles in a straight line upon his own land! . . . One hundred 
and fifty persons own half England, seventy-five persons own half Scot- 
land, thirty-five persons own half Ireland; and all the lands of England, 
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland are owned by less than 60,000 persons." 
{Worksy XXIX, 273.) 



i68 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

pleasure, the thirst for excitement and change, the 
criminal luxury and idleness of the rich, together with 
the discontent and unrest, the misery, dirt, and 
degradation of the poor. The overworked and the 
underworked were alike victims of prodigious social 
folly. "Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels 
instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. 
We have blackened every leaf of English greenwood 
with ashes, and the people die of cold; our harbors 
are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of 
hunger." ^ In moods of anger and despair, Ruskin 
pictured the English people as a money-making mob, 
concentrating its soul upon pounds, shillings, and 
pence, and worshiping with all its heart the great 
Goddess of Getting-on, the Goddess, too, "not of 
everybody's getting on, — but only of somebody's 
getting on." The Crystal Palace, a gigantic toy-shop 
of glass, opened in London in 1854 to celebrate Eng- 
land's vast material expansion and "to exhibit the 
paltry arts of our fashionable luxury," was to him a 
perfect symbol of nineteenth-century life, its frivolity, 
its love of novelty, its immense and childish curiosity, 
its indifference or insensitiveness to beauty; — a su- 
preme glorification indeed of an age of machinery and 
commercialism. Ruskin looked upon this age not 
merely with anger, but with genuine apprehension. 
Carlyle himself was not more troubled. Social 
changes and disturbances were in the air which 
threatened revolution. He saw with great clearness a 
coming struggle between a feudalistic and a demo- 
cratic social order, for he knew that a society founded 

1 Works, XVIII, 502. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 169 

upon injustice could not endure. The upper classes 
were losing their power to govern, while the populace 
was losing respect for its rulers and was pressing 
blindly forward along a road that led it knew not 
where. "We are on the eve of a great political crisis, 
if not of political change/* Ruskin wrote in 1869. 
"A struggle is approaching between the newly-risen 
power of democracy and the apparently departing 
power of feudalism; and another struggle, no less 
imminent, and far more dangerous, between wealth 
and pauperism." For eleven hundred years Europe 
has had kings to rule over it, but for the last fifty 
years the people "have begun to suspect, and of late 
they have many of them concluded, that they have 
been on the whole ill-governed, or mis-governed, by 
their kings. Whereupon they say, more and more 
widely, *Let us henceforth have no kings; and no 
government at all.''' ^ In an article in the Contem- 
porary Review for May, 1873, he stated "the causes 
and terms of the economical crisis of our own day" as 
follows: first, the growth of capitalism, by "occupa- 
tion of land, usury, or taxation of labor"; second, 
the luxury and extravagance of capitalism, monopo- 
lizing "the music, the painting, the architecture, the 
hand-service, the horse-service, and the sparkling 
champagne of the world." In consequence, "it is 
gradually in these days becoming manifest to the 
tenants, borrowers, and laborers, that instead of 
paying these large sums into the hands of the 
landlords, lenders, and employers, for them to 
purchase music, painting, etc., with, the tenants, 
1 Worksy XVIII, 494-5. 



I70 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

borrowers, and workers had better buy a little music 
and painting for themselves. . . . These are views 
which are gaining ground among the poor; and it is 
entirely vain to repress them by equivocations. They 
are founded on eternal laws." ^ 

This system of things, as Ruskin saw it in the dec- 
ades i860 to 1880, continued to be upheld in the 
main by the old individualistic economic creed of 
Adam Smith and Bentham, Malthus, and Ricardo. 
Its sacred principles — laissez-faire^ competition, self- 
interest — were yet regarded as the foundations of 
national prosperity, the fixed laws by which men 
were to get on in the world, although the thought and 
influence of J. S. Mill showed clear tendencies in the 
opposite direction. It was a political economy that 
boasted of being a science. It professed to be imper- 
sonal and dispassionate. With infinite pains its high 
priests had erected an image of wood and stone, which 
they hailed as "the economic man," and which they 
now called upon all the Philistines to bow down to 
and worship, solemnly adjuring them to repeat all 
the pious formulas by which men were to be eco- 
nomically saved: law of rent, law of population, law of 
wages, and the other changeless dogmas of thei^ 
religion of Mammon. To Ruskin these doctrines 
were as false as they were soulless. He therefore 
attacked them as boldly as, twenty years before, he 
had attacked the lifeless conventions of the contem- 
porary schools of art. But his attack was not only 
bold and brilliant; it was scornful, ironic, iconoclastic, 
and irreverent. He opposed dogma with dogma. He 

1 Works, XVII, 564-5. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 171 

asked pertinent questions in a manner that must have 
seemed impertinent to the staid and stolid defenders 
of the orthodox creed. He flung challenge after 
challenge into the camp of the enemy, and, as Carlyle 
with grim pleasure declared, he plunged his rapier 
again and again up to the hilt into the belly of their 
pagan deity. 

The science of modern political economy, said 
Ruskin, "is a Lie**; it is a "carnivorous political 
economy; it founds an ossifiant theory of progress on 
the negation of a soul. . . . All our hearts have been 
betrayed by the plausible impiety of the modern 
economist telling us that, *To do the best for our- 
selves, is finally to do the best for others.* Friends, 
our great Master said not so; and most absolutely we 
shall find this world is not so made. Indeed, to do 
the best for others, is finally to do the best for our- 
selves; but it will not do to have our eyes fixed on 
that issue." ^ When J. S. Mill declared that moral 
considerations had nothing to do with political 
economy, Ruskin asked if questions of commerce and 
industry did not involve the justice and goodness of 
men. " Economy,** he said, " does not depend merely 
on principles of * demand and supply,* but primarily 
on what is demanded and what is supplied.'* ^ Against 
the statement of Jevons that pleasure and pain "are 
the ultimate objects of political economy,'* he loosed 
a shaft that might have come from Carlyle*s quiver: 
"there is a swine*s pleasure, and dove*s; villain*s 
pleasure and gentleman*s, to be arranged.** To Mill's 
aphorism that "labor is limited by capital,** Ruskin 

1 Works, XVII, 26; XVIII, 455- ' ^bid., XVII, 178. 



172 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

replied: "in an ultimate, but entirely impractical 
sense, labor is limited by capital, as it is by matter — 
that is to say, where there is no material there can be 
no work, — but in the practical sense, labor is limited 
only by the great original capital of head, heart, and 
hand." ^ A follower of the economists had defended 
in orthodox fashion the extravagant expenditures of 
the rich on the ground that they benefited the poor. 
Ruskin drew from the experience of his father's wine- 
firm and their workers in Spain the apt and ironic 
rejoinder: "these laborers produced from the earth 
annually a certain number of bottles of wine. These 
productions were sold by my father and his partners, 
who kept nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of the price 
themselves, and gave one-tenth, or thereabouts, to 
the laborers. In which state of mutual beneficence 
my father and his partners naturally became rich, 
and the laborers as naturally remained poor." 
Again and again he opposed the stock English notion 
that it does not matter what a laborer produces, so 
long as he works and is paid for his work: "the real 
good," he contended, "of all work, and of all com- 
merce, depends on the final intrinsic worth of the 
thing you make, or get by it."^ Concerning the 
sacred laws of population and of wages, he asked 
embarrassing questions. "It is proposed to better the 
condition of the laborer by giving him higher wages. 
* Nay,' say the economists, — 'if you raise his wages, 
he will either people down to the same point of misery 
at which you found him, or drink your wages away.* 
He will. I know it. Who gave him this will? Sup- 
1 Worksy XVII, 177. 2 ii^ii^ XVIII, 391. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 173 

pose it were your own son of whom you spoke, de- 
claring to me that you dared not take him into your 
firm, nor even give him his just laborer's wages, 
because if you did he would die of drunkenness, and 
leave half a score of children to the parish. ' Who 
gave your son these dispositions* — I should enquire. 
Has he them by inheritance or by education? By 
one or other they musf come; and as in him, so 
also in the poor. . . . Ricardo defines what he 
calls the 'habitual rule of wages' as 'that which 
will maintain the laborer.' Maintain him! Yes; 
but how?" 

Political economists, said Ruskin, call their science 
"the science of getting rich. But there are many 
sciences as well as many arts of getting rich. Poison- 
ing people of large estates, was one employed largely 
in the Middle Ages; adulteration of food of people of 
small estates, is one employed largely now." Another 
method of acquiring wealth, as practiced by modern 
business, was pungently set forth by Ruskin in the 
form of parable, a means of illustration that he was 
fond of using: "Suppose that three men, instead of 
two, formed the little isolated republic, and found 
themselves obliged to separate, in order to farm differ- 
ent pieces of land at some distance from each other 
along the coast: each estate furnishing a distinct kind 
of produce, and each more or less in need of the 
material raised on the other. Suppose that the third 
man, in order to save the time of all three, undertakes 
simply to superintend the transference of commodi- 
ties from one farm to the other; on condition of 
receiving some sufficiently remunerative share of 



174 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

every parcel of goods conveyed, or of some other 
parcel received in exchange for it. If this carrier or 
messenger always brings to each estate, from the 
other, what is chiefly wanted, at the right time, the 
operations of the two farmers will go on prosperously, 
and the largest possible result in produce, or wealth, 
will be attained by the little community. But sup- 
pose no intercourse between the landowners is pos- 
sible, except through the travelling agent; and that, 
after a time, this agent, watching the course of each 
man's agriculture, keeps back the articles with which 
he has been entrusted until there comes a period of 
extreme necessity for them, on one side or other, and 
then exacts in exchange for them all that the dis- 
tressed farmer can spare of other kinds of produce: 
it is easy to see that by ingeniously watching his 
opportunities, he might possess himself regularly of 
the greater part of the superfluous produce of the two 
estates, and at last, in some years of severest trial or 
scarcity, purchase both for himself and maintain the 
former proprietors thenceforward as his laborers 
or servants.'' ^ 

These assaults, with scores of others, witty, ironical, 
trenchant, brought down upon Ruskin the jeers of 
the philistines, who vented their wrath by calling him 
a sentimentalist and a Don Quixote, a madman who 

1 Works, XVII, io6, io8, 6i, 51. C/. 138. "Ricardo's chapter on Rent 
and Adam Smith's eighth chapter on the wages of labor stand, to my 
mind, quite Sky High among the Monuments of Human Brutification; 
that is to say, of the paralysis of human intellect fed habitually on Grass, 
instead of Bread of God. . . . Nothing that I yet know of equals the 
saying of Bright, in the House, that 'in a common sense mercantile 
community the adulteration of food can only be considered a form of 
competition.'" (XXXVI, 416, 593.) 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 175 

was attempting to explode established dogmas with 
mere heresies and paradoxes. It was in truth a many- 
headed monster that he set out to slay, when he put 
aside his drawing and his art-study to take up the 
problems of social reform. And when he forsook his 
art, he gave up his peace and happiness of heart," at 
least as he had known these in the old undisturbed 
days. Whoever will go through the mass of published 
letters and diaries for the decades 1 860-1 880, a most 
intimate record of Ruskin's mind for those years, will 
find there the tragic story of a brilliant and refined 
nature, goaded on and on by its own sense of the evil 
and injustice in the affairs of men, until it is obscured 
in the temporary eclipse of brain-fever, emerging 
again for a brief interval, only to pass at last into the 
lengthened twilight which preceded the end. Fors 
Clavigera^ the collection of letters to workingmen, 
reads more like the outburst of a disillusioned and 
perplexed modern Hamlet than the sober attempt of 
a wise reformer to right the wrongs of the world about 
him. For after all Ruskin did not regard social re- 
form as his proper field. "It is the 'first mild day of 
March,' " he wrote in 1867, "and by rights I ought to 
be out among the budding banks and hedges, outlin- 
ing sprays of hawthorne and clusters of primrose. 
That is my right work." ^ In the years after i860, he 
often referred to his vacillating temper, vacillating 
between desire for "quiet investigation of beautiful 
things," and duty to battle with the misery and folly 
of humanity.2 As his biographer has said, the moral 
and active side of his soul was at strife with the artis- 
1 Works, XVII, 376. q. XVII, 415. 2 q. XVIII, intro. XIX. 



176 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

tic and contemplative. The contrast between the old 
beautiful world that had burst upon him when he had 
journeyed leisurely by stage-coach to the Alps or to 
Italy, and the new world of industry, was more 
tormenting each time that he revisited the continent. 
"This first day of May, 1869/' he said in his preface 
to The ^ueen of the Air, "I am writing where my 
work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of 
the snow of the higher Alps. In that half of the per- 
mitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought 
upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make 
beloved by others. The light which once flushed 
those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple 
at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which 
once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with 
azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, 
belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very 
glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if 
Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank 
at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed and 
foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. These 
are no careless words — they are accurately — horribly 
— true. I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of 
Alpine fountain at its source was clearer. This morn- 
ing on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from the 
beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom 
deep." ^ The acute disturbances that Ruskin*s mind 
suffered from time to time during these years is no- 
where better suggested, perhaps, than in the bitter 
comment upon his life as "a series of delights which 

1 Works, XIX, 293. Cf. XVI, 338; XXXVII, 204; also, travel by coach 
as contrasted with travel by rail, XXV, 451. 



ART AND THE MODERN WORLD 177 

are gone forever, and of griefs which remain for- 
ever." 1 

This conflict on the higher levels of his nature be- 
tween the ethical and the aesthetic was inevitable, 
however, for, as we have seen, both passions had their 
rootage in a unity deeper down, and-neither could be 
completely satisfied unless it was true to its source. 
Ruskin's interest in art demanded that the moral and 
social conditions of man should be improved as the 
foundation of art. It was futile to teach the depend- 
ence of art upon sound life, when society seemed to be 
rushing madly into everything that was unsound. " It 
is the vainest of affectations,*' he declared, "to try 
and put beauty into shadows, while all real things that 
cast them are in deformity and pain. . . . You can- 
not have a landscape by Turner^ without a country for 
him to paint; you cannot have a portrait by Titian^ 
without a man to be portrayed. . . . The beginning of 
art is in getting our country clean^ and our people 
beautiful. . . . Beautiful art can only be produced 
by people who have beautiful things about them, and 
leisure to look at them." ^ Manifestly it was not a 
time for the entertainment of the arts, but for far^ 
weightier and more fundamental work. Ruskin 
therefore sternly resolved, as he said in Fors^ to en- 
dure passively the present condition no longer, but 
to do his poor best to lead the way to better things. 
People had read his descriptions of nature and art and 

^ Letters to Norton^ I, 184. Ruskin's letters to Norton are the best record 
of his mental condition from i860 to 1880. It should be noted, however, 
that his love affair with Miss Rose LaTouche was in this period another 
important source of spiritual disturbance. 

2 Works, XVII, intro. XXIV; XX, 107; XVI, 338. 



178 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

had pronounced them pretty, but they had heeded 
not his call to beauty. The day had come, therefore, 
for him to cease speaking and to begin doing. "My 
thoughts have changed also, as my words have; and 
whereas in earlier life, what little influence I obtained 
was due chiefly to the enthusiasm with which I was 
able to dwell on the beauty of the physical clouds, 
and of their colors in the sky; so all the influence I 
now desire to retain must be due to the earnestness 
with which I am endeavoring to trace the form and 
beauty of another kind of cloud than those; the 
bright cloud of which it is written — *What is your 
life?'"i 

Wofksy XVIII, 146. 



CHAPTER VT 

THE ART-IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 
AND THE NEW POLITICAL ECONOMY 

"Life without industry is guilt, and industry without 
art is brutality. . . . The real science of political econ- 
omy, which has yet to be distinguished from the bastard 
science, as medicine from witchcraft, and astronomy from 
astrology, is that which teaches nations to desire and labor 
for the things that lead to life." — Ruskin. 

The inspiration for social reform came to Ruskin 
from art. His clue to the solution of social prob- 
lems came also from art, and chiefly from architec- 
ture. In a concluding chapter of the last volume 
of Modern Painters^ he said: "Every principle of 
painting which I have stated is traced to some vital 
or spiritual fact; and in my works on architecture the 
preference accorded finally to one school over an- 
other, is founded on a comparison of their influences 
on the life of the workman — a question by all other 
writers on the subject of architecture wholly forgotten 
or despised." ^ The earliest suggestion of the precise 
form which his social thought was to take may be 
found in two or three passages in Seven Lamps (1849), 
where he drew the attention of his readers to the bear- 
ing of architecture upon the condition of the work- 
man: "I believe the right question to ask respecting 
all ornament is simply this: was it done with enjoy- 

1 Worksy VII, 257. 
179 



i8o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ment — was the carver happy while he was about it?" 
Mere benevolent advice and instruction, he contends, 
are futile as cures for the idleness and discontent ot 
the masses. What the men need is occupation, but, 
he hastens to add, " I do not mean work in the sense of 
bread, — I mean work in the sense of mental interest."^ 
This idea of mental interest in work, the alpha and 
omega of Ruskin*s social philosophy, was fully 
developed for the first time in the famous chapter on 
Gothic architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851- 
1853), — one of the most convincing and most elo- 
quent statements of the fundamental principles of 
social reform written in the nineteenth century. "To 
some of us when we first read it, now many years 
ago," said William Morris, "it seemed to point out a 
new road on which the world should travel." " It set 
fire to his enthusiasm," says Professor Mackail, 
Morris's biographer, "and kindled the belief of his 
whole life." ^ Mr. Frederic Harrison, biographer and 
friend of Ruskin, as well as himself a social reformer, 
called the chapter "the creed, if it be not the origin, 
of a new industrial school of thought." Ruskin him- 
self attached great importance to this memorable 
utterance for he called it "precisely and accurately 
the most important chapter in the whole book"; and 
he said that "of all that I have to bring forward 
respecting architecture, this is the one I have most at 

1 Works, VIII, 218, 261. 

2 Morris, it will be recalled, printed the chapter at the Kelmscott Press 
in 1892, writing for it an introduction from which the above remark of his 
is taken. First distributed free, and afterwards sold in sixpenny pamph- 
let form, the chapter was used as the manifesto of the Working Men's 
College, at its opening in 1854. 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY i8i 

heart." We have seen how passionately he admired 
Gothic. From the multitudinous and fascinating 
diversity in the surface and form of those "perpendic- 
ular flights of aspiration," erected by the piety and 
enthusiasm of the communes of the twelfth and 
thirteenth centuries, — Chartres, Beauvais, Amiens, 
Rouen, and Rheims, — he discovered intimations of 
the true spirit of man, its freedom and fierceness, its 
fun and terror, its faith and longing, its ever haunting 
sense of mystery in the midst of the here and now. 
Upon their walls the poetry of the soul seemed to be 
written, not of the master builders only, but of 
multitudes of lesser workmen as well. In the shap- 
ing and placing of stone upon stone, in the creation of 
tower and arch, pinnacle, capital, and tracery, in the 
redundant and endlessly varied carving of leaf and 
vine, gargoyle and saint, Ruskin found perpetual 
evidence that the workman had realized, even though 
in humble manner often, the joy of creative effort. 
It was Gothic architecture, therefore, that revealed 
to him his way out of the wilderness of social prob- 
lems which confronted him when he first looked 
upon the modern world. Gothic taught him that 
happiness in labor is the right of every worker, from 
gifted genius to humblest toiler. "It is, perhaps, the 
principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of 
architecture," he said, "that they receive the results 
of the labor of inferior minds." What we have to do 
with all our laborers is "to look for the thoughtful 
part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we 
lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged 
to take with it." 



1 82 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Ruskin begins, in the chapter on the nature of 
Gothic, by condemning modern industry because it 
degrades men to machines. The trouble with labor 
to-day, he declared, is that men are "divided into 
mere segments of men — broken into small fragments 
and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelli- 
gence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, 
or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a 
pin or the head of a nail." It is this degradation, he 
continues, "which, more than any other evil of the 
times, is leading the masses of the nation everywhere 
into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a 
freedom of which they cannot explain the nature 
to themselves." What the worker must have is the 
opportunity for self-expression in his work, even 
though mechanical precision and perfection should 
be sacrificed. "You must either make a tool of the 
creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. 
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of 
tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If 
you will have that precision out of them, and make 
their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and 
their arms strike curves like compasses, you must 
unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits 
must be given to make cogs and compasses of them- 
selves. All their attention and strength must go to 
the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of 
the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the 
souFs force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide 
it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely 
precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and 
the whole human being lost at last — a heap of saw- 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 183 

dustj so far as its intellectual work in this world is 
concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go 
into the form of cogs and compasses but expands, 
after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. 
On the other hand, if you will make a man of the 
working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him 
but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything 
worth doing; and the engine- turned precision is lost 
at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, 
all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon 
failure, pause after pause; but out comes the whole 
majesty of him also; and we know the height of it 
only, when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, 
whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be 
transfiguration behind and within them. . . . Men 
may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like 
cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain 
in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother 
their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting 
pollards the suckling branches of their human intelli- 
gence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the 
worm's work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs 
to yoke machinery with, — this it is to be slave- 
masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in 
England, though her feudal lords' lightest words were 
worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed 
husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, 
than there is while the animation of her multitudes is 
sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the 
strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the 
fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a 
line. And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze 



i84 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled 
so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculp- 
tors : examine once more those ugly goblins, and form- 
less monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and 
rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of 
the life and liberty of every workman who struck the 
stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of 
being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can 
secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe 
at this day to regain for her children/* ^ 

The gospel of joy in work was a new and strange 
gospel to Ruskin's contemporaries, and to many it is 
a very strange gospel still. The mill owners and the 
laborers of i860, like the political economists of that 
day, looked upon work as something to be endured 
from necessity, something to be done and over with 
in the shortest time possible. It was a painful activ- 
ity, falling chiefly upon the unfortunate, to be paid 
for by wages, — a disagreeable means to an unavoid- 
able end.^ "We do not pretend that these dingy 
toilers in mine or factory are happy, " said the cap- 
tains of industry of that day; **but their toil keeps 
them alive; otherwise they and their children would 
starve to death like rats upon a deserted ship. We 

1 Worksy X, 196, 194, 192-4. 

2 The difference between Ruskin's view of labor and the economists' 
is well shown in a remark that Ruskin wrote on the margin of Mill's 
Principles of Political Economy; in Mill's "first definition of labor he 
includes in the idea of it 'all feelings of a disagreeable kind connected 
with one's thoughts in a particular occupation.' True; but why not also, 
* feelings of an agreeable kind'?" (Works, XVII, 67.) Mr. Frederic 
Harrison, in his Memoirs (I, 236), in speaking of Ruskin's vehement 
disapproval of Millet, the painter, quotes Ruskin: "no painter has any 
business to represent labor as gloomy. It is not gloomy, but blessed 
and cheerful." 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 185 

do not even pretend that we ourselves enjoy our bus- 
iness, but we like to make money and we like the 
houses and lands and social position that our money 
provides. Moreover, behold the unexampled wealth 
and prosperity of England, — the richest nation on the 
globe!" Thus they argued. Whatever else these 
men were, they were not hypocritical. They suffered 
no delusions to distort the clear view they had of their 
own activities. Their convictions were reinforced, 
too, by a school of economic thought which, as we 
have seen, assumed that " the ruling passions of man- 
kind were wealth and ease." But Ruskin, like Carlyle, 
took a different view. To him work was less a means 
than an end. It was not so much a necessity as an op- 
portunity, and, if it yielded a livelihood, it should 
also develop a life. More than all else, therefore, Rus- 
kin sought to put the art-motive into every possible 
form of human effort, into the crafts and industries, 
as it was already in the fine arts. He would broaden 
the definition of art and remove the rigid boundaries 
that existed between the lower kinds of art and the 
higher. 

"There is not a definite separation between the 
two kinds," he said, — "a blacksmith may put soul 
into the making of a horseshoe, and an architect may 
put none into the building of a church. Only exactly 
in proportion as the Soul is thrown into it, the art 
becomes Fine. . . . Art is the operation of the hand 
and the intelligence of man together: there is an art 
of making machinery; there is an art of building 
ships; an art of making carriages; and so on. All 
these, properly called Arts, but not Fine Arts, are 



i86 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

pursuits in which the hand of man and his head go 
together, working at the same instant." ^ The first 
principle of social reform and the last, Ruskin in- 
sisted, was that in labor hand and soul should be 
united, for if it was only by labor that thought could 
be made healthy, it was no less true that only by 
thought could labor be made happy. The primal 
eldest curse of modern industry was that it crushed 
the soul out of man and made work a torment. The 
one way to extirpate this root-calamity, therefore, 
was to establish as fast and as far as possible a condi- 
tion of things wherein each worker should realize, 
according to his ability, and according to the nature 
of his work, that sense of life which comes in fullest 
measure to the creative artist, to him who bodies 
forth through one medium or another the forms of 
things unseen. The conservation of the individual 
through creative industry, — this was the star that 
Ruskin followed in his strange adventures upon the 
troubled waters of political economy and social 
reconstruction. 2 

^ Worksy XI, intro. XIX; XVI, 294. With perhaps mingled jest and 
earnest, because he was alluding to the much laughed-at Hinksey Diggers 
of Oxford (of whom more later), but with more earnest than jest, Ruskin 
included road-making as an occupation with something of "art" in it 
(XX, intro. XLIIL) "A true artist," he said, "is only a beautiful devel- 
opment of tailor or carpenter." (XXVII, 186.) Ruskin tried his hand at 
various "arts and crafts," including brick-laying, carpentering, house- 
painting, street-sweeping, and scrubbing. Cf. Cook, Lijey I, 447; XXIII, 
52; XXI, intro. XX. 

2 "I am myself more set on teaching healthful industry than anything 
else, as the beginning of all redemption," said Ruskin in Fors. (XXVII, 
364.) "It matters little, ultimately, how much a laborer is paid for 
making anything; but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is 
compelled to make. ... All professions should be liberal, and there 
should be less pride felt in peculiarity of employment, and more in excel- 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 187 

It is well-nigh impossible to bring into connected 
form an account of these adventures, since Ruskin 
was the most irresponsible of voyagers, sometimes 
pursuing his course by the most devious of routes, 
and never weary of pushing his prow into various 
queer creeks and bays along the way. His writings 
on society and the laws by which men live are to be 
found not in one or two volumes, but in a dozen. 
They are, moreover, in the highest degree discur- 
sive, — "desultory talk," Ruskin once aptly called 
them, — " unprogressive inlets" of thought, he de- 
scribed them on another occasion. Just as in earlier 
days he had frequently been drawn away from art 
into the discussion of "irrelevant and Utopian 
topics" against which his friends had remonstrated 
in vain, so now he digressed at will from political 
economy and the guild of St. George into the fields of 
art, religion, mythology, and etymology. He con- 
cludes one of his chapters in Munera Pulveris with an 
extended exposition of the attitude of Dante, Homer, 
Plato, and Spenser on the use or the misuse of wealth; 
and in Fors he finds illustrations and lessons for 
modern conditions of society in Giotto's frescoes, 
Chaucer's Romance of the Rose, and other literary and 
art works all the way down to Lockhart's Life of 
Scott, So, too, in Time and Tide, brilliant suggestions 
for a new social order are freely interspersed with all 
manner of whimsical subjects, such as pantomime 
and Japanese jugglers, the four possible theories 

lence of achievement." — In connection with his teaching at the Working 
Men's College, Ruskin testified before a parliamentary committee: "My 
eflPorts are directed not to making a carpenter an artist, but to making 
him happier as a carpenter." {Works, XVIII, 391; X, 201; XIII, 553.) 



i88 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

respecting the origin of the Bible, the use of music 
and dancing under the Jewish theocracy, and the like. 
Ruskin*s fondness for verbal distinctions founded 
upon etymological principles involved him not only 
in futile digressions, but also at times in plain confu- 
sion of terms, as when in one work he distinguishes 
"labor" from "effort" (labor being that amount of 
effort which brings distress or loss of life), and then in 
subsequent books he drops the distinction, using the 
words in their ordinary meanings. Intermingled with 
these alien topics is an increasing amount of person- 
alia, which in Fors is often little more than querulous 
egotism, interesting as the self-revelation of an 
extraordinarily sensitive man of genius during a 
prolonged period of mental disturbance, but irrel- 
evant, if not impertinent, in a serious treatment of 
social ideals.^ In Fors he made several attempts to 
bring together these scattered statements of social and 
economic doctrine, but gave up each time, finding, as 
he said, that his abstracts needed "further abstrac- 
tion." In his later years, even more than in his earlier, 
his mind lacked what Arnold called '' ordo concatena- 
tioque veriy^ order and linked succession of truth. 

But it is to be remembered, as regards any state- 
ment of fundamental principles, that Ruskin's plans 
were abruptly blocked by his publishers and the pub- 
lic. In their fragmentary state. Unto This Last and 
Munera PulveriSy the only works that were written to 
deal with political economy by itself, were never 
regarded as more than "prefaces" and "introduc- 

^ E. g., "I rather enjoy talking about myself, even in my follies." 
(XXIX, 74.) 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 189 

tory papers." Stung to anger by the hostile reception 
of Unto This Lasty a book into which Ruskin thought 
he had put better work than into any of his former 
writings and "more important truths than all of them 
put together," he did intend, he says, after two more 
years of thinking, "to make it the central work of 
my life to write an exhaustive treatise on Political 
Economy." ^ But his purposes were a second time 
frustrated. And what we have, therefore, as the 
substance of his social philosophy, apart from its 
sources in his philosophy of art, are a few "broken 
statements of principle" in Unto This Last and Mun- 
era PulveriSy followed by many schemes and ideals of 
social reconstruction set forth mainly in the discur- 
sive form of letters in Time and Tide and Fors Clavi- 
geray together with innumerable pregnant hints and 
suggestions scattered broadcast over all his later 
work and even here and there in some of the earlier 
volumes. Indeed the most casual efforts of his pen 
can scarcely be neglected, for in them the reader is 
likely to discover not a little of Ruskin's most lumi- 
nous thought and happiest irony, without which the 
central doctrines would themselves lose much of their 
trenchant force. 

The author of Modern Painters began by defining 
the aim of political economy to be " the multiplication 
of human life at the highest standard." ^ Certain 
things in the world are useful and lead to life; certain 
other things are useless or harmful and lead to death. 
Give a man corn and he will Xwpfgivt him night- 
shade and he will die. It follows, therefore, that " the 
1 Works, XVII, 143. ""I^id., XVII, 150. 



I90 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

essential work of the political economist is to deter- 
mine what are in reality useful or life-giving things, 
and by what degrees and kinds of labor they are 
attainable and distributable. This investigation 
divides itself under three great heads: — the studies, 
namely, of the phenomena, first, of Wealth; secondly, 
of Money; and thirdly, of Riches. . . . The study 
of Wealth is a province of natural science: — it deals 
with the essential properties of things. The study of 
Money is a province of commercial science: — it deals 
with conditions of engagement and exchange. The 
study of Riches is a province of moral science: — it 
deals with the due relations of men to each other in 
regard of material possessions; and with the just laws 
of their association for purposes of labor." ^ Although 
none of these divisions of inquiry in the field of 
economics proper was carried much beyond a state- 
ment of definitions, Ruskin had least of importance 
to say concerning the intricate subject of money, 
which we may therefore dismiss with his preliminary 
assertions. "Money," he said, "has been inaccu- 
rately spoken of as merely a means of exchange. But 
it is far more than this. It is a documentary expres- 
sion of legal claim. It is not wealth, but a documen- 
tary claim to wealth, being the sign of the relative 
qualities of it, or of the labor producing it, to which, 
at a given time, persons, or societies, are entitled." ^ 
Concerning wealth Ruskin regarded it as his first 

1 Works, XVII, 152. 

2 Ibid.y XVII, 157. Ruskin here and there had a good deal to say on 
the subject of money, but most of what he says is either too incomplete 
and detached or fantastic to be of much value. In the later Fors days 
especially, he wrote much on the subject of interest, which he condemned 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 191 

object to give a "stable** definition, and "to show 
that the acquisition of wealth was finally possible 
only under certain moral conditions of society." ^ 
This statement of purpose reveals unmistakably 
. the fact that the field of political economy in his 
hands was immensely broadened so as to include the 
larger questions of ethics and society. Wealth, he 
had said, deals with the properties of things; it 
"consists of things essentially valuable." Value, as 
the life-giving power of anything, is both intrinsic 
and effectual: intrinsic value is the absolute power of 
anything to support life"; effectual value is intrinsic 
value plus "acceptant capacity. The production of 
effectual value, therefore, always involves two needs: 
first, the production of a thing essentially useful; then 
the production of the capacity to use itT ^ A strange 
gospel for a political economist! Wealth is, then, 
neither money nor accumulation of goods alone? An 
aristocract with ten thousand acres of land, or a 
plutocrat with hundreds of old masters in his picture 
gallery is not to be called wealthy? Not at all 
necessarily, said Ruskin, since a thing is not wealth 
unless it is a useful thing in the possession of him who 
can use it for his own or his neighbor*s good. The 
right thing in the right hands, the tools of a trade or 
the instruments of culture to him who can use them, 
• — these only are wealth.^ 

as pillage and theft of the laborer, as increment to rich and decrement to 
poor, a tax by the idle and the rogue on the busy and honest, etc., etc. 
The reader may find a large number of references to the subject of money 
and interest listed in the Index to the Library Edition. 

1 Works, XVII, 19. 

2 Ihid., XVII, 154. 

' " There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of 



192 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

A man*s possessions, or his wealth, as wealth is 
ordinarily understood, Ruskin called his 'Viches.'* 
Riches are power over men, since no man can accu- 
mulate material possessions without being able to 
command the labor of others. This power is good or 
bad according as it is used justly or unjustly. Hence 
the problem of riches merges into a problem of wages, 
or just payment for labor, — a matter of capital 
importance, as Ruskin was well aware. In one way 
or another, it involved practically every large social 
question over which he was most disturbed, — rela- 
tions between the employer and his men, conditions 
of employment and kind of work, and scores of other 
matters hardly less pressing to-day than they were in 
the decade 1 860-1 870. Like every other social 
reformer and idealist, Ruskin could point out far 
more difficulties than he could provide solutions for. 
But no other man of that day had a surer insight into 
the heart of the situation, or expressed his opinions 
with more startling audacity and more telling wit 
and irony. What he demanded above all things was 
justice. An unjust wage permitted concentration of 
riches into the hands of few and checked the advance- 
ment of the worker; while a just wage tended to the 
distribution of wealth into the hands of many, making 
it easier for each worker to rise in the social scale, if 
he chose to make the effort.^ Clearly the application 

joy, of admiration. That country is richest which nourishes the greatest 
number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, hav- 
ing perfected the function of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest 
helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over 
the lives of others." {Works, XVII, 105.) 

^ "The universal and constant action of justice in this matter is there- 
fore to diminish the power of wealth, in the hands of one individual, over 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY r93 

of human values to the scheme of things in the 
economic world threatened to work havoc with 
sacred and immutable laws, and to frighten off the 
specter of the ^'economic man" as the bugaboo of a 
disordered imagination ! In opposition to the dogma 
that wages were measured only by competition, Rus- 
kin at the outset boldly advocated a fixed rate of 
wages for definite periods, irrespective of demand for 
labor. To provide against casual employment he 
further urged the maintenance of "constant numbers 
of workmen, whatever may be the accidental demand 
for the article they produce."^ The complicated 
business of the world must in time be so adjusted, 
he thought, as that every willing worker shall have 
regularity of employment and contentment in it, a 
consummation only to be reached through an organ- 
ization of labor of which most of the world at that 
time had no vision. 

The first step, however, must be a just wage. But 
what is a just wage? — Ruskin asked. Reduced to its 
simplest terms, the law of justice respecting payment 
of labor is " time for time, strength for strength, and 
skill for skill. ... I want a horseshoe for my horse. 
Twenty smiths, or twenty thousand smiths, may be 
ready to forge it; their number does not in one atom's 
weight affect the question of the equitable payment 
of the one who does forge it. It costs him a quarter of 
an hour of his life, and so much skill and strength of 
arm, to make that horseshoe for me. Then at some 

masses of men, and to distribute it through a chain of men." {Worksy. 
XVII, 70.) 

1 Works y XVII, 35. 



194 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

future time I am bound in equity to give a quarter of 
an hour, and some minutes more, of my time (or of 
some other person's at my disposal), and also as much 
strength of arm and skill, and a little more, in making 
or doing what the smith may have need of." ^ ^*Does 
not Ruskin, in such words, show himself blind to the 
plain facts of life?" we ask. Is his labor worth no 
more than the blacksmith's? Is one man's time as 
valuable as another's, regardless of natural gift or 
skill? Or, if this is not quite the correct conclusion 
(since a just wage includes payment of skill for skill), 
how much work shall a carpenter render for an hour's 
work of a trained surgeon? What shall a poet pay 
his plumber for a day's time? Both cost and price 
are of course inextricably bound up with these ques- 
tions, since cost, or the quantity of labor required to 
produce a thing, and price, or the exchange value of a 
thing, must be calculated finally in terms of labor. 
Ruskin recognized the problem as one of "consider- 
able complexity!" But he hopelessly complicated it 
by further qualifications and distinctions. He did 
not mean, he said, to confuse kinds, ranks, and 
quantities of labor with its qualities. "I never said 
that a colonel should have the same pay as a private, 
nor a bishop the same pay as a curate. Neither did I 
say that more work ought to be paid as less work." 2 
He then introduced a distinction between "effort" and 
^' labor," — labor being '^suffering in effort," whereas 
effort by itself was the joyful expenditure of human 
energy in results that were recreative. On the basis 
of these differences, "the *cost' of the mere perfect- 

1 Worksy XVII, 66. 2 iiid^^ XVII, 7on. 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 195 

ness of touch in a hammer-stroke of Donatello*s, or 
a pencil-touch of Correggio*s, is inestimable by any 
ordinary arithmetic." ^ But even at this point Ruskin 
was not at the end of his difficulties. For when he 
undertook to define a unit of "labor*' in terms of an 
hour's or a day's time, he was confronted with a 
factor in the problem which he could not eliminate, 
even though the orthodox economists could, — namely, 
that "as some labor is more destructive of life than 
other labor, the hour or day of the more destructive 
toil is supposed to include proportionate rest." ^ 
Any final determination of a just wage, therefore, 
must have involved him in an elaborate analysis of 
human variables and of conditions of toil of quite 
infinite complexity. 

Nevertheless Ruskin could not get rid of the notion 
that although "the worth of work may not easily be 
known, it has a worth just as fixed and real as the 
specific gravity of a substance." ^ The platonism of 
his youth still clung to him ! He hoped to get back to 
fixed values in political economy, just as he had gone 
back to fixed potentialities of beauty in the data of 
art. Passionately desiring to improve the conditions 
of men, he allowed too much for the stability of class 
differences and too little for the instability of human 
tastes and the wide variations in human ability; and 
he likewise left out of account the principles of evo-, 
lution as applied to human progress, whereby the 
values of things change with the changing environ- 
ment and ideals of man. On the lines he followed 
there would seem to be no way of reducing to a com- 

1 Works, XVII, 1840. 2 /^j^., XVII, 184. ' Ihid., XVII, (fj. 



196 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

mon denominator the various kinds of labor. The 
cost of a surgeon's operation and the cost of a cob- 
bler's repairing are incommensurables. Not until 
mankind reaches the stage when an hour's work of 
one person is considered the full equivalent in com- 
mercial value of an hour's work of any other person, 
regardless of rank or skill, can wages be determined 
on the basis of time alone, — the only ultimately just 
basis, probably, and exactly the solution that Mr. 
Bernard Shaw reached in his famous debate on 
Equality! 

But it is no doubt unfair to criticise "introductory 
statements" as though they were final principles. 
In connection with his social philosophy, the main 
thing to note at this point is that Ruskin made a bold 
frontal attack upon the accepted dogmas of political 
economy, and led the fight for a recognition of the 
human factor in industry, an element quite disre- 
garded by the British manufacturer. As Professor 
Hobson says, "Ruskin's first claim as a social reformer 
is that he reformed Political Economy." Ruskin bent 
all his efforts to cast the money-changers out of the 
temple. He denied that any right scheme of social 
action could be founded upon a faith in the immutable 
selfishness of man, with cunning or violence thrown 
into the scale, when necessary to obtain advantage. 
He denied that the interests of masters and operatives 
were antagonistic and that expediency was the only 
guide in relations between them. With scornful 
irony he ridiculed the notion, held by many, that the 
luxury of the lord in his palace was a benefit to the 
poor, — pointing out the inconsistency of upholding 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 197 

the rich because they benefited society by drinking 
champagne out of bottles, while condemning the poor 
because they drank beer out of buckets ! A strange 
world it was that occupied itself in piling up riches, 
whether they were accumulated at the cost of human 
life or in the conservation of it! To buy in the cheap- 
est market might mean ruin to honest producers, and 
to sell in the dearest market, death to needy consum- 
ers. But what did it matter to John Bull, since 
commercial operations were founded not upon justice 
but upon legality? 

The revolutionary character of Ruskin*s attack 
upon such stock notions may be judged from a few of 
the questions which, at a meeting of the National 
Association for the Promotion of Social Science, he 
"thought should be put to eminent professors of 
political economy on behalf of the working men of 
England:" — 

(i) "Supposing that, in the present state of 
England, capital is necessary, are capitalists so? 
In other words, is it needful for right operation 
of capital that it should be administered under 
the arbitrary power of one person?" 

(2) "Whence is all capital first derived?" 

(3) " If capital is spent in paying wages for 
labor or manufacture which brings no return (as 
the labor of an acrobat or manufacturer of fire- 
works), is such capital lost or not? and if lost, 
what is the effect of such loss on the future 
wages fund? " 

(4) " If under such circumstances it is lost, 
and can only be recovered (much more recovered 



198 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

with interest) when it has been spent in wages 
for productive labor or manufacture, what 
labors and manufactures are productive, and 
what are unproductive? Do all capitalists know 
the difference? and are they always desirous to 
employ men in productive labors and manufac- 
tures, and in these only?*' 

(5) " Considering the unemployed and pur- 
chasing public as a great capitalist, employing 
the workmen and their masters both, what 
results happen finally to this purchasing public if 
it employs all its manufacturers in unproductive 
labor? and what if it employs them all in pro- 
ductive labor? " 

(6) " * If any man will not work, neither shall 
he eat/ Does this law apply to all classes of 
society?" ^ 

Reviewers assailed Ruskin for the "effeminate 
sentimentality" of a political economy like this. He 
retorted that political economy was impossible except 
"under certain conditions of moral culture." The 
whole weight of his argument, consequently, rested 
upon a different set of premises, an unshakable con- 
viction that every principle and practice of commer- 
cial and industrial activity must be subjected to the 
test of its effect upon life, and that human nature, at 
bottom not predatory but affectionate, "can be 
altered by human forethought."' "All effort in social 
improvement is paralysed," he said, "because no one 
has been bold enough or clear-sighted enough to put 
and press home this radical question: ' What is indeed 

^fForks,XVUyS37-^' 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 199 

the noblest tone and reach of life for men; and how 
can the possibility of it be extended to the greatest 
numbers?* It is answered, broadly and rashly, that 
wealth is good; that art is good; that luxury is good. 
Whereas some of them are good in the abstract, but 
good if only rightly received. Nor have any steps 
whatever been yet securely taken, — nor, otherwise 
than in the resultless rhapsody of moralists, — to as- 
certain what luxuries and what learning it is either 
kind to bestow, or wise to desire." ^ By insisting, 
therefore, that man is a creature with loyalties and 
affections that can be appealed to, and that the aim of 
political economy is the lifting of life to the highest 
standard, Ruskin rightly held that he builded upon 
fact and not upon sentiment. Assured of the solidity 
of his foundation, he went forward with plans that 
meant radical changes in the entire structure of 
economic thought. Political economy in the future 
must be regarded not merely as a science of getting^ 
but also as a science of spending; since just distribu- 
tion and right consumption are the real tests of 
production. Twenty people can gain money for one 
who can use it, and the vital question for individual 
and for nation is, never, " how much do they make?" 
but ^' to what purpose do they spend?" ^ And there- 
fore the products of your industry can never be justly 
distributed or wisely consumed, Ruskin argued, if you 
do not all the while take into account the nature of 
the consumer as well as of the thing consumed; just 
as you must in production consider the effect of the 
thing produced upon the workman as well as its value 
1 Works, VII, 430. 2 /^j^., XVII, 98. 



200 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

for the market. Otherwise your political economy 
remains a mere bandying of empty formulas and a 
piling up of useless statistics. 

Ruskin was accordingly determined to let into this 
dismal science the light of ethical principles, to widen 
its scope, and to appeal first of all to men as indi- 
viduals to obey the laws of justice and love. Of the 
worker he demanded honesty, industry, frugality. 
^*Do good work, like a soldier at his post,'* he said in 
substance, ^'whether you live or die. Have an inter- 
est in being something as well as in getting something. 
Be less anxious to rise out of your station than to per- 
fect yourself within it. Remember that no political 
arrangements nor privileges can lift up loafers and 
drunkards, lechers and brutes." He called upon the 
consumer to demand the products of healthy and 
ennobling labor, and to sacrifice **such convenience, 
or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the 
degradation of the workman." ^ His appeal to the 
captains of industry was no less direct and concrete. 
On the one hand they must be faithful to their engage- 
ments, — the corner-stone of commerce, — and they 
must at all costs maintain "the perfection and 
purity" of their goods. On the other, as masters of 
large groups of men, they were to assume responsibil- 
ity for the individual and associated life of these men 
while in their employ, seeing to it that employment 
was beneficial and not harmful. Ruskin's vision, like 
Carlyle's, carried him forward to a time when the 
merchant should be as honored as the soldier, when 
indeed it should be a more sacred calling to provide 

1 Works, X, 196. 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 201 

for the life of a nation in peace than to imperil it with 
death in war. In that day the captains of industry, 
like the captains of war now, would be leaders, by 
reason of ability and self-sacrifice, not by reason of 
privilege and fortune; while the public would be 
prompt to bestow upon them a recognition and 
reward commensurate with their efforts. 

A consummation like this, however, could not be 
realized by individual effort alone. The modern 
world was too complicated and too interrelated. 
Half the troubles, in fact, as matters already stood 
was that even good men were pulling in contrary 
directions. Patterns of unselfishness in their private 
relations, perhaps, they conducted their business on 
the maleficent principle of competition, whereby, 
each regarded his neighbor's interest as in collision 
with his own. To Ruskin this was wrong through 
and through. It meant that man was a beast of prey. 
It assumed the calculating cultivation of his worst 
instincts, and it meant the final triumph of anarchy 
over law. In the presence of the vast mutual depend- 
encies of modern commerce, the self-centered utilita- 
rianism of Adam Smith and Bentham, always false, 
now became even worse, — it became criminal folly, 
for it gave support to the most dangerous conditions 
in the social order, the extremes of wealth and pov- 
erty and the complete separation of masters and 
men. In reality, said Ruskin, the management of a 
great industry, or even of a great state, should rest 
upon exactly the same elementary principles as those 
which obtained in a household or upon a ship, where 
success was unthinkable without co-operation. In- 



202 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

dividual effort was indispensable, but it was far from 
enough. Big business meant the accumulation and 
concentration of wealth to such a degree, and involved 
the association of workmen to such an extent, that 
only through collective effort could economic and 
social reform be realized; — a conclusion recognized 
everywhere to-day, but regarded as revolutionary in 
1864. Without knowing, therefore, how far or in 
what directions his gospel might be destined to go, 
Ruskin preached co-operation as a necessary basis of 
reconstruction, calling upon the masters of each 
industry "not to try to undersell each other, nor seek 
to get each other's business, but to form one society, 
selling to the public under a common law of severe 
penalty for unjust dealing, at an established price;" 
and calling upon the workers to cast their toil more 
and more "into social and communicative systems", 
somewhat after the fashion of the medieval guilds, for 
mutual support and protection. "Government and 
Co-operation," he said, "are in all things the Laws of 
Life; Anarchy and Competition the Laws of Death." ^ 
At this point, accordingly, his political economy 
broadened out into social economy, or into a discus- 
sion of the varied problems of human welfare in a 
complex social order. After the forced interruptions 
of Unto This Last and Munera Pulveris^ Ruskin gave 
up all attempt to set his economic theories into fixed 
order, and abandoned himself more than ever to a 
discursive treatment of all the questions that pressed 
upon him. No subject was henceforth treated exten- 
sively by itself. It was taken up, dropped, taken up 
i/Fof/^/, XVII, 317, 75- 



THE ART IMPULSE IN INDUSTRY 203 

again, and in the end perhaps left in a tentative and 
unfinished state. Economics, ethics, education, 
politics, schemes of social reconstruction, Utopian 
commonwealths, accounts of actual experiments 
jostle one another throughout Time and Tide^ Fors 
Clavigera, and the later lectures. And yet in these 
discursive writings is to be found a large number of 
brilliant and pregnant suggestions for a new order, 
constituting on the whole the most fruitful side of 
Ruskin's social philosophy, apart from the funda- 
mental principle with which we began the present 
chapter, — the conservation of the individual by means 
of the creative impulse. Without pretending to be 
exhaustive, we shall therefore in the next chapter 
endeavor to bring into connection these scattered 
schemes and suggestions of reform, concluding with a 
brief account of his adventures into Utopia. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 

"As we advance in our social knowledge, we shall en- 
deavor to make our government paternal as well as 
judicial; that is, to establish such laws and authorities as 
may at once direct us in our occupations, protect us 
against our follies, and visit us in our distress: a govern- 
ment which shall repress dishonesty, as it now punishes 
theft; which shall show how the discipline of the masses 
may be brought to aid the toils of peace, as discipline of 
the masses has hitherto knit the sinews of battle; a govern- 
ment which shall have its soldiers of the ploughshare as 
well as its soldiers of the sword, and which shall distribute 
more proudly its golden crosses of industry — golden as 
the glow of the harvest, — than now it grants its bronze 
crosses of honor — bronzed with the crimson of blood." — 
Ruskin. 

Part I — Social Ideals 

To begin with, Ruskin insisted upon the right of 
every child to be well born. He looked to a future 
when nations would give "some of the attention to 
the conditions affecting the race of men, which it has 
hitherto bestowed only on those which may better 
its races of cattle.'* ^ To this end marriage must be 
regulated. Permission to marry should be a public 
attestation of the fact that youth and maid had lived 
rightly and had attained such skill "in their proper 
handicraft and in the arts of household economy," 
as to insure good hope that they would be able "to 
maintain and teach their children." Without 
1 Works, XVII, 420. 
204 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 205 

accepting in detail many of Ruskin^s fantastic ideas 
upon this subject, most thoughtful persons to-day 
would agree with him in principle, namely, that the 
young couples who measure up to these standards 
should, where necessary, be kept in employment at 
the expense of the state during the years of stress, 
when they were finding their way in a complex social 
order. For upon purity of birth everything else must 
depend. Without it there could be no real elevation 
in the life of the state, whether corporate or indi- 
vidual. 

Until communities saw to it that a child was well 
born they could not be certain that it would be well 
educated. And without education as its foundation 
Ruskin's structure of social reform would of course 
have nothing to stand upon. "There is only one cure 
of public distress," he said, "and that is a public 
education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, 
and just." ^ State regulation of education was there- 
fore as important as state regulation of marriage. 
"I hold it for indisputable," he insisted, "that the 
first duty of a state is to see that every child therein 
shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till 
it attain years of discretion." 2 With an insight like 
that of Pestalozzi or Froebel, Ruskin understood the 
awakening potentialities of childhood, waiting upon 
guidance towards fine issues or base. "The human 
soul in youth," he wrote, "is not a machine of which 
you can polish the cogs with any kelp or brickdust 
near at hand; and, having got it into working order, 
and good, empty, and oiled serviceableness, start 
1 Works, XVIII, 107. 2 Ibid., XI, 263. 



2o6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

your immortal locomotive, at twenty-five years old 
or thirty, express from the Strait gate, on the 
Narrow Road. The whole period of youth is one 
essentially of formation, edification, instruction; I 
use the words with their weight in them; in taking 
of stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes, and 
faiths. There is not an hour of it but is trembling 
with destinies, — not a moment of which, once past, 
the appointed work can ever be done again, or the 
neglected blow struck on cold iron.'* ^ As this passage 
implies, education for Ruskin did not mean erudition. 
Pouring in facts, however well sifted and ordered, 
does not educate a mind, unless the facts are so 
related to the child's nature as to evoke from it right 
conduct. "You do not educate a man by telling him 
what he knew not, but my making him what he was 
not." 2 At every step of the process, from beginning 
to end, Ruskin would have the training of youth 
regulated by ethical ideals: getting knowledge should 
mean getting the right knowledge; reading books, the 
right books; learning a trade, learning to do some- 
thing not only consistent with one's health and 
capacities but also "serviceable to other creatures." 
The sympathies and tastes of the child must be 
cultivated with as much attention as the knowing 
faculties, since a person's usefulness in life will 
depend upon his attitude towards society and towards 
his own work in it, no less than upon his intellectual 
capacity or technical skill taken by itself.^ True 

1 Works, VI, 485. 

2/^z^., XVII, 232. 

^ Ruskin summarized the teaching and practice of his Hfe in the brilliant 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 207 

education must not only be moral, in this broad sense. 
It must also sift men according to their capacities 
and the work they are to do; the differences among all 
men being "eternal and irreconcilable, between one 
individual and another, born under absolutely the 
same circumstances." Ruskin carried these general 
principles yet one step further and insisted that 
individual training must in the end be so ordered as 
that men shall find contentment in the lower callings 
when they are without capacity for the higher, — a 
consummation which could be realized (as Ruskin 
knew) only as a result of changes in the social con- 
sciousness towards certain kinds of labor. Let the 
chance of advancement in station be extended to all, 
as a matter of course, but let it be understood that 
education is itself advancement in life, that it should 
be rather a means of getting on with one's work than 
of climbing up in the world, and that it is better to 
train a man to be more expert in his trade than to 
inspire him with discontent, because, by reason of 
natural ability, he must remain there. 

Ruskin of course made no attempt to propose any- 
thing so definite as a curriculum for the realization of 
these principles. And yet with characteristic au- 
dacity he threw out a great number of suggestions, 
remarkable on the whole for their wisdom, and still 
more remarkable in the decades 1 860-1 880 as bril- 

aphorism on education quoted in a previous chapter: "The entire object 
of true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but 
enjoy the right things: — not merely industrious, but to love industry — not 
merely learned, but to love knowledge — not merely pure, but to love 
purity — not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice." {Worksy 
XVIII, 435.) 



2o8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

liant anticipations of the future — Ruskin^s future 
and ours. "There are, indeed," he said, "certain 
elements of education which are alike necessary to 
the inhabitants of every spot of earth. Cleanliness, 
obedience, the first laws of music, mechanics, and 
geometry, the primary facts of geography and astron- 
omy, and the outlines of history, should evidently be 
taught alike to poor and rich, to sailor and shepherd, 
to laborer and shopboy. But for the rest, the effi- 
ciency of any school will be found to increase exactly 
in the ratio of its direct adaptation to the circum- 
stances of the children it receives; and the quantity of 
knowledge to be attained in a given time being equal, 
its value will depend on the possibilities of its instant 
application. You need not teach botany to sons of 
fishermen, architecture to shepherds, or painting to 
colliers; still less the elegances of grammar to children 
who throughout the probable course of their total 
lives will have, or ought to have, little to say, and 
nothing to write." ^ The program thus outlined 
includes the elements of both liberal and technical 
training, and is elsewhere described in detail. The 
laws of health came first. The schools of St. George 
were to be built in the country, in the midst of large 
spaces of land, where children should have plenty of 
fresh air and room for all kinds of healthful exercises. 
Children next were to be taught reverence, compas- 
sion, and truth: reverence for what was most worthy 
"in human deeds and human passion "; compassion, 
so that "it shall be held as shameful to have done a 
cruel thing as a cowardly one"; truth, so that a boy 

^Worksy XXIX, 495. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 209 

shall have as intense a purpose "to think of things as 
they truly are, as to see them as they truly are/' 
so far as in him lies.^ Ruskin would also require 
music and dancing of all, — music to include the 
learning of the best poetry by heart. It was of 
course consistent with his social philosophy that he 
should attach the highest importance to the aesthetic 
training of the child. He wished to see bare and 
bleak schoolhouses transformed into attractive cen- 
ters of study by means of beautiful surroundings, 
without and within. 2 "We shall not succeed," he 
said, "in making a peasant's opinion good evidence 
on the merits of the Elgin marbles; yet I believe we 
may make art a means of giving him helpful and 
happy pleasure, and of gaining for him serviceable 
knowledge." ^ 

With these elements, physical, ethical, and aes- 
thetic, as foundations, every boy and girl should be 
taught manual training, politics, religion, mathe- 
matics, natural science, and history. Respecting the 
last three branches, Ruskin made a curious and 
suggestive provision: "Your schools," he said, "will 
require to be divided into three groups: one for 
children who will probably have to live in cities, one 
for those who will live in the country, and one for 
those who will live at sea; the schools for these last, of 
course, being always placed on the coast. And for 

1 Works, XVII, 398-9. 

2 Ruskin had definite ideas on the sociah'zation of art. He advocated 
not only the collection of art in public galleries and in all private homes, 
"as a means of refining the habits and touching the hearts of the masses 
of the nation in their domestic Hfe" {Works, XVI, 8i), but urged the use 
of art for school rooms, guild-halls, almshouses and hospitals. 

3 Works, XVI, 144- 



210 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

children whose life is to be in cities, the subjects of 
study should be, as far as their disposition will allow 
of it, mathematics and the arts; for children who are 
to live in the country, natural history of birds, insects, 
and plants, together with agriculture taught practi- 
cally; and for children who are to be seamen, physical 
geography, astronomy, and the natural history of sea 
fish and sea birds." ^ General training was thus 
always to be followed by special training, in obedience 
to the principle that youths are to be placed "accord- 
ing to their capacities in the occupations for which 
they are fitted." Government, therefore, should pro- 
vide schools for every trade; and in order to discover 
what youths in given localities possess special skill in 
one or another of the arts and crafts, "schools of 
trial" should be established in these communities 
at state expense. Ruskin*s whole conception of edu- 
cation was thus shot through with the conviction 
that training must have constant regard for social 
ends. This was a pioneer and iconoclastic concep- 
tion for the England of his time. He contended that 
a boy was not educated merely because he "could 
write Latin verses and construe a Greek chorus." 
He contended that science for schools (and science 
was just being introduced into the higher curricula) 
should have less to do with theories and more with 
realities: botany should deal with the plant life 
around the students, and chemistry should teach 
them "to find out whether the water is wholesome in 
the back-kitchen cistern, or whether the seven acre 
field wants sand or chalk." 2 In short he demanded 
1 fForksy XVII, 400. 2 7^,-^.^ XVI, 112. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 211 

for every youth a full and harmonious co-ordination 
of his life with the life of the community in which he 
was destined to live, such as no system of education 
has realized even to the present day.^ 

Ruskin was fully alive to the effects of such an 
educational program upon position in life and upon 
the problem of debasing labor. He faced the issues 
more squarely than reformers of his type are wont to 
do. Will a boy, he asked, who has been educated 
according to the foregoing program wish to be a 
tailor or a coalheaver? Some of his readers and 
correspondents argued that among well-educated 
boys there would remain a percentage ''constitution- 
ally inclined to be cobblers, or looking forward with 

1 Ruskin's ideas on education are a chapter by themselves. Various 
writers have called attention to the richness of his suggestions and to their 
connection with the aims and principles of educational reformers. Rus- 
kin, it will be remembered, was anything but a closet theorist. He was 
always interested in the practical work of the schoolroom, as shown in his 
frequent visits to the school at Coniston, and in his relations with a school 
for girls at Winnington Hall, Cheshire, and with the Whitlands Training 
College for Girls at Chelsea, where he made many visits and did much to 
encourage the pupils in various activities, such as dancing, drawing, and 
festival-making. Then, of course, he was Slade Professor of Fine Arts at 
Oxford for many years, and for four or five years taught drawing classes 
at the Working Men's College, London. 

Ruskin was always very strongly opposed to the examination system 
in schools. "The madness of the modern cram and examination systern 
arises principally out of the struggle to get lucrative places; but partly also 
out of the radical block-headism of supposing that all men are naturally 
equal, and can only make their way by elbowing; — the facts being that 
every child is born with an accurately defined and absolutely limited 
capacity; that he is naturally (if able at all) able for some things and 
unable for others; that no effort and no teaching can add one particle 
to the granted ounces of his available brains; that by competition he may 
paralyse or pervert his faculties, but cannot stretch them a line; and that 
the entire grace, happiness, and virtue of his life depend on his content- 
ment in doing what he can, dutifully, and in staying where he is, peace- 
ably." (/For/^.r, XXIX, 496.) 



212 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

unction to establishment in the oil or tallow line, or 
fretting themselves for a flunkey's uniform." ^ But 
Ruskin did not read man's life in this way, although 
few writers have more emphatically declared their 
fixed faith in the unconquerable differences in the 
clay of the human creature. The effect of an educa- 
tional system that reached down to the masses and 
touched every life there would be, he thought, to 
reduce the wide differences in bodily and mental 
capacity, so that "in a few generations, if the poor 
were cared for, their marriages looked after, and 
sanitary law enforced," the old gin-drinking, criminal 
type would begin to disappear, while a new type 
would emerge, healthy, progressive, and with no 
disposition to be fettered like slaves to a life of monot- 
onous toil. 2 Although brought up in the lap of 
luxury himself, Ruskin well knew the effect of rough 
work upon a man. "The man," he said, "who has 
been heaving clay out of a ditch all day, or driving an 
express train against the north wind all night, or 
holding a collier's helm in a gale on a lee shore, or 
whirling white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, is not 
the same man at the end of his day, or night, as one 
who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything 
comfortable about him, reading books, or classing 
butterflies, or painting pictures." ^ How shall these 

1 Works, XVII, 405. 

2 " Crime can only be truly hindered by letting no man grow up a 
criminal — by taking away the will to commit sin; not by mere punishment 
of its commission. Crime, great and small, can only be truly stayed by 
education — not the education of the intellect only, which is, on some men, 
wasted, and for others mischievous; but education of the heart, which is 
alike good and necessary for all." {Works, XVII, 392.) 

3 Worksy XVIII, 417. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 213 

lower jobs be done when men are better educated and 
desire time to sit in a quiet room for the cultivation of 
intellectual and aesthetic interests? After all, should 
not education be denied to some people in order that 
they may be kept in slavery for the lowest work, in 
accordance with Plato's scheme in his Republic? 
This has been the traditional faith and the traditional 
solution among the conservative and aristocratic 
classes in all ages, including our own. Ruskin was 
himself a Tory, and medievalism ran in his blood, but 
he could not endure a system that kept men, capable 
of better things, in involuntary servitude. Accord- 
ingly he attacked the labor problem from several 
different angles, and especially from the point of view 
of one who profoundly believed in education for all. 

As we shall see again in connection with his guild- 
idea, he believed in fixed wages, for fixed periods, 
settled not by the law of competition, but by the law 
of justice; and he believed in an eight-hour day for 
all workers as a minimum. These principles were 
fundamental and should, he thought, be universal. 
But it was possible to go much further. Let the 
demand for foolish luxuries and for the products of 
debasing employment be greatly diminished. Re- 
peatedly Ruskin pointed out that luxuries must be 
paid for by labor withdrawn from the production of 
useful things, such as food and clothing. Society 
should curb its extravagance, at least until "all the 
poor are comfortably housed and fed." Foul and 
mechanical work, too, could actually be lowered to a 
minimum, if people would consistently refuse to 
demand its products. "It is the duty of all persons 



214 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

in higher stations of life by every means in their 
power," he said, " to diminish their demand for work 
of such kind, and to live with as little aid from the lower 
tradeSy as they can possibly contrive." ^ In this 
connection he never neglected an opportunity to 
urge people, when buying objects of art, to buy only 
those which were the creations of thoughtful, and not 
of mechanical y labor. It is safe to say that Ruskin 
himself could not enjoy a beautiful thing when he 
knew that it was the product of debasing toil. On the 
other hand, he loved so much the evidence of a free, 
happy mind in work that he no doubt often over- 
estimated the values of what in reality was often 
crude and unlovely. But his principle was sound. 
Get the happy workman first, he argued, and you will 
get better art in the end if not in the beginning. "Let 
us remember, that every farthing we spend on objects 
of art has influence over men*s minds and spirits, 
far more than over their bodies. By the purchase of 
every print which hangs on your walls, of every cup 
out of which you drink, and every table off which you 
eat your bread, you are educating a mass of men in 
one way or another. You are either employing them 
healthily or unwholesomely; you are making them 
lead happy or unhappy lives; you are leading them to 
took at Nature, and to love her — to think, to feel, 
to enjoy, — or you are blinding them to Nature, and 
keeping them bound, like beasts of burden, in me- 
chanical and monotonous employments." ^ 

i/Fory^j, XVII, 423. 

2 Ibid., XII, 68, It may be worth noting that Ruskin recognized 
certain kinds of work as debasing and " mechanical": — "simply or totally 
manual work; that, alone, is degrading" (XVII, 423): forging, "unclean, 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 215 

Ruskin would not only substitute so far as possible 
the products of happy labor for the products of ser- 
vile labor, — he would, by a change of attitude in the 
entire social consciousness, elevate many kinds of 
work to positions of dignity. Any necessary work is 
noble, if we only think it so and rightly honor the 
loyal worker. The toil of the miner or stoker would 
be lightened if he received recognition from a grateful 
public, not merely in a just wage, but in some badge 
of service that should give him a place in the hearts of 
people, like that of the brave sailor or soldier. We 
dishonor the worker when we dishonor his work. 
Ruskin knew that the art-motive could not be put 
into every kind of employment, but he saw the possi- 
bility of offsetting the influence of education upon 
lower callings by a change of mind toward these 
callings. With cunning irony yet with an under- 
current of serious intention, he argued that servile 
work if undertaken in a serious spirit might be the 
holiest of all and that therefore evangelicals and 
ritualists might perform such work as evidence of the 
sincerity of their Christianity! "Let the market 
have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit, and the 
trade its heroisms as well as war!" Ruskin indeed 
proposed that the merchant's work should be made a 
liberal profession like the lawyer's and physician's, 
demanding like them its peculiar sacrifices and 

noisome, or paltry manufactures, various kinds of transport, — and the 
conditions of menial service" (XVII, 428): "all work with fire is more or 
less harmful and degrading; so also mine, or machine labor" (VII, ^lyn.): 
" a great number of quite necessary employments are, in the accuratest 
sense, 'Servile'; that is, they sink a man to the condition of a serf, or un- 
thinking worker, the proper state of an animal, but more or less unworthy 
of men." (XVII, 406.) 



2i6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

receiving its special rewards. He not only proposed, 
he pointed out a way of realization. The first thing 
was to remove the stigma of vulgarity and degrada- 
tion attached to the business of .the retail merchant. 
This could be done, he maintained, "by making all 
retail dealers merely salaried officers in the employ of 
the trade guilds,'* thus taking away the temptations 
to profit and the various other tendencies to selfish- 
ness usually recognized as part of the business. To 
all objections that might be raised against such a 
system, Ruskin was content to answer that if a soldier 
could be trained to offer himself fearlessly to the 
chance of being shot, then " assuredly, if you make it 
also a point of honor with him^^ ^ a merchant, or a 
"dealer," could also be sufficiently trained in self-de- 
nial to look "you out with care such a piece of cheese 
or bacon as you have asked for." 

It was necessary only to change the consciousness 
of society toward various kinds of employment, so 
that there should be less concern among workers 
about what work they were doing, and far more about 
how they were doing it. Suppose the different trades 
were taken up in this spirit, with a consequent 
enormous rise in the standards of achievement, until 
by the rules of the craft no man were permitted to 
have independent use of any material until he knew 
how to make the best of it? What would be the 
result? "The arts of working in wood, clay, stone, 
and metal," said Ruskin, "would all be fine arts 
(working in iron for machinery becoming an entirely 
distinct business). There would be no joiner's work, 

^The italics are mine. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 217 

no smith's, no pottery nor stone-cutting, so debased 
in character as to be entirely unconnected with the 
finer branches of the same art; and to at least one of 
these finer branches (generally in metal-work) every 
painter and sculptor would be necessarily apprenticed 
during some years of his education. There would be 
room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every 
grade of practical intelligence and productive imagi- 
nation." ^ Consistent with his ideals of education and 
of art, as well as with his schemes for the elevation of 
many kinds of work, he would go yet further with the 
crafts. "It would be a part of my scheme of physical 
education," he said, "that every youth in the state — 
from king's son downwards, — should learn to do 
something thoroughly and finely with his hand, so as 
to let him know what touch meant; and what stout 
craftsmanship meant; and to inform him of many 
things besides, which no man can learn but by some 
severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once 
learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a 
fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its 
mortar; and he has learned a multitude of other 
matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. 
He might choose his craft, but whatever it was, he 
should learn it to some sufficient degree of true 
dexterity: and the result would be, in after life, that 
among the middle classes a good deal of their house 
furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough 
work, more or less clumsily, but not ineffectively, 
got through, by the master himself and his sons, 
with much furtherance of their general health and 

1 Works, XVII, 426. 



21 8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

peace of mind, and increase of innocent domestic 
pride and pleasure, and to the extinction of a 
great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean 
handicraft." ^ 

With the increase of handicrafts there should follow 
a reduction of machine-labor to the minimum. Rus- 
kin's attitude toward machinery has often been 
misunderstood and his antagonism exaggerated. He 
was first and last opposed to machine-labor because 
he regarded it as servile, invariably degrading the 
man who became a slave to it, grinding out his soul 
and reducing his body to the level of an automaton. 
He was opposed to it in the arts because it put 
mechanism in the place of skill, destroyed sensibility 
to artistic values, and substituted mere agreeable 
form for evidence of human care and thought and 
love: "so that the eye loses its sense of this very 
evidence, and no more perceives the difference be- 
tween the blind accuracy of the engine, and the 
bright, strange play of the living stroke." ^ He op- 
posed machinery on economic grounds also; arguing 
that it was wrong to use machines so long as men 
starved for want of employment. But even Ruskin's 
medieval enthusiasm for handwork never prompted 
him to urge the complete abandonment of machinery. 
Where they could effectively shorten human labor or 
accomplish what unaided human hands could not 
otherwise accomplish, machines were to be used; as, 
for example, "on a colossal scale in mighty and useful 
works," such as reclaiming waste lands, irrigating 
deserts, deepening river channels, and otherwise 

1 Works, XVII, 426. 2 ihid,^ XII, 173. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 219 

recovering earth's resources for man's use.^ Machin- 
ery moved by steam, manufactories "needing the 
help of fire," he would have reduced to the lowest 
limit, "so that nothing may ever be made of iron 
that can as effectively be made of wood or stone; 
and nothing moved by steam that can be as effec- 
tively moved by natural forces." He would use all 
vital muscular power first, all natural mechanical 
power next (wind, water and electricity), and all 
artificially mechanical power last. 2 The whole 
problem of servile employment, to summarize, 
would thus be solved in these various ways: — by a 
reduction in the demand for the product of servile 
work and for senseless luxuries; by the elevation of 
many kinds of work, now regarded as vulgar and 
menial, to a position of honor in the public mind; by a 
raising of the standard of the crafts and a union of 
these with the arts through guilds or companies of 
workers, together with an immense extension of 
craft-interest and skill into all kinds of domestic 
manual work; and, finally, by a reduction of machine- 
labor to the minimum, and all possible increase of 
hand-labor to the maximum. 

But even if society applied these remedies, there 

1 Ruskin's panegyric on the locomotive is one of his most wonderful 
passages of prose; in the Cestus of Jglaia, XIX, 60. 

2 Works, XX, 113. Ruskin raged against the noise and dirt of railroads, 
but he traveled on them and admitted their necessity: e. g., "Steam, or 
any modes of heat-power, may only be employed justifiably under 
extreme or special conditions of need; as for speed on main lines of com- 
munication, and for raising water from great depths, or other such work 
beyond human strength." (XXVIII, 655.) He believed in a far more 
extensive use of wind and water power than was realized anywhere in his 
day or is realized even to-day. He suggested, for example, the use of 
reservoirs filled by the tides, to furnish power for mills. 



220 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

would remain rough work to be done. With all his 
dreaming, Ruskin did not expect to see a state of 
society in which all disagreeable or debasing toil 
should be completely eliminated. This should be 
given, first, to all persons willing to work but out of 
employment. Every such man, woman, and child 
should be received at the nearest government agency 
or school and put to the work they were fit for "at a 
fixed rate of wages determinable every year." Should 
they object, they were then to be compelled to per- 
form the more painful and degrading tasks, especially 
those "in mines and other places of danger (such 
danger being, however, diminished to the utmost 
by careful regulation and discipline)." ^ Criminals 
and idlers, Ruskin believed, should likewise be rigo- 
rously conscripted for the more dangerous work, such 
"mechanical and foul employment" taking the form 
of punishment or probation. Indeed forced employ- 
ment for these classes should be made a means of 
reformation even more than of punishment. All 
three classes — the poor, the indolent, the vicious — 
might under proper governmental supervision be 
organized into groups for the performance of various 
enterprises to be carried on by the state, such as road- 
making, reclamation of waste land, harbor-making, 
all kinds of porterage, repair of buildings, and even 
certain kinds of arts and crafts, like dress-making, 
pottery, and metal work. For the rough work that 
might yet remain to be done, especially agricultural 
and other out-door work, not a little of it should be 
done by workers recruited from the upper classes! 

1 Works, XVII, 22. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 



221 



Ruskin looked with disgust upon an aristocracy that 
consumed enormous amounts of time in wasteful, or 
destructive field sports, particularly hunting, shoot- 
ing, and horse-racing. Were this exertion put to 
serviceable use on the farm, the gain would be incal- 
culable all round. "It would be far better, for in- 
stance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, 
than ride over other people's." i As for that portion 
of the rough work still untouched, notably manufac- 
ture, it would fall to the lot of a large class incapaci- 
tated by nature for anything higher. Like Carlyle, 
Ruskin held to the belief that some people are born to 
do the lower work such as was performed by serfs in 
medieval times; intellectually they are the inferiors, 
whom education can make little of and to whom 
should fall the lot of doing the "common mechanical 
business" of the world. He of course felt that the 
status of these workers would be determined in great 
part by the kind of masters they served. His ideal 
for them, however, was essentially medieval; whether 
domestic or civil servants they should be attached by 
loyalty to a benevolent superior, who would have 
authority to compel them to work when they refused 
to serve willingly. In truth Ruskin believed in 
slavery, if by slavery is meant that there is a govern- 
ing power somewhere which can, when necessary, 
force men to work. "I am prepared," he said, "if 
the need be clear to my own mind, and if the power is 
in my hands, to throw men into prison, or any other 

1 Works, VII, 429. Cf. XVII, 234. While Ruskin all his life vigorously i > 
condemned destructive field sports, he no less vigorously encouraged all ■' 
forms of athletic exercise, such as boxing, wrestling, cricketing, rowing, 
etc. Cf. VII, 340. 



222 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

captivity — to bind them or to beat them — and force 
them, for such periods as I may judge necessary, to 
any kind of irksome labor: and, on occasion of des- 
perate resistance, to hang or shoot them. But I will 
not sell them/' ^ 

It is clear that Ruskin was not a sentimentalist in 
his treatment of the labor problem. His ideals imply, 
throughout, the rigors of work, but also its sacredness 
and necessity. As an accomplished draughtsman, as 
an intense student of technique, he knew what preci- 
sion of hand meant and what prolonged effort, 
patience, and uprightness of character it cost the 
masters. He knew, too, by observation, if not by 
experience, that the vast resources of earth could not 
be made available for mankind without continuous 
and wearing toil. His convictions were undoubtedly 
intensified by the influence of Carlyle; for in his later 
writings he returned repeatedly to the idea of noble- 
ness in work, and he preached a gospel of labor that 
often has the unmistakable accent of his master. 
"All education," he said, for example, "begins in 
work. What we think, or what we know, or what we 
believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only 
thing of consequence is what we do''' ^ Like Carlyle, 
also, he made much of the ideal of soldiership in work, 
a new chivalry of labor. Again and again he appealed 
to the British people to lift the worker to the level of 
the fighter, to make the business of maintaining life at 
least as honorable as destroying it, to band the work- 
ers together in companies to do some of the hard and 
servile jobs, performing them with all the esprit de 

1 Worksy XVII, 438. 2 im,^ XVIII, S07. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 223 

corps and elan of an army going into battle ! Soldiers 
themselves, in the first place, when not fighting 
should be working. "Our whole system of work," he 
said, "must be based on the nobleness of soldier- 
ship — so that we shall all be soldiers of either plough- 
share or sword; and literally all our actual and pro- 
fessed soldiers, whether professed for a time only, or 
for life, must be kept to hard work of hand, when not 
in actual war; their honor consisting in being set to 
service of more pain and danger than others; to life- 
boat service; to redeeming of ground from furious 
rivers or sea — or mountain ruin; to subduing wild and 
unhealthy land, and extending the confines of colonies 
in the front of miasm and famine, and savage races." ^ 
In the second place, not only should trained soldiers 
be employed when not fighting, but also civilians 
should be enlisted for the purpose of doing some of the 
hard work. Society had only to make up its mind 
that way and it would find that the virtues of loyalty 
and obedience and industry could be developed as 
well for manufacture as for massacre; that men 
could serve their country with the spade even better 
than with the sword; and that the builders were as 
worthy of honors and pensions in old age or disabil- 
ity, as the destroyers. A rational and fruitful ideal! 
An ideal which future generations of mankind will 
have the wisdom to adopt, if they shall keep the 
world safe for growth in the arts of peace. ^ 

The problem of servile labor, however, is a problem 
that in the main and for the present involved only the 
lower orders of society. Ruskin was no less concerned 

1 Worksy XVII, 463. 2 iiid,^ XVIII, 419, 449. 



224 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

with the position and function of the higher orders, 
and he had much to say, first and last, regarding their 
part in the social scheme and the complex questions 
involved therein. The aristocracy of a nation he 
regarded as composed of (a) landed proprietors and 
soldiers, (b) captains of industry, (c) and professional 
classes and masters in science, art, and literature.^ 
From the landed aristocracy should be chosen "the 
captains and judges of England, its advocates, and 
generally its State officers, all such functions being 
held for fixed pay." Looking forward to ideal condi- 
tions, Ruskin would set apart certain state officers 
who were to be "charged with the direction of public 
agency in matters of public utility," — anticipating in 
this pregnant phrase a vast extension of government 
control. 2 His ideas of control for the future were 
further suggested in his conception of the proper 
duties of bishops: "Over every hundred (more or 
less) of the families composing a Christian State, 
there should be appointed an overseer, or bishop, to 
render account, to the State, of the life of every 
individual in those families; and to have care both of 
their interest and conduct to such an extent as they 
may be willing to admit, or as their faults may jus- 
tify: so that it may be impossible for any person, 
however humble, to suffer from unknown want, or 
live in unrecognized crime; — such help and observ- 
ance being rendered without officiousness either of 

^ I omit a discussion of the soldier and professional classes, since Ruskin 
said nothing concerning them suflSciently new or striking to deserve 
special treatment. The reader may consult the general Index under 
"Soldiers" and * Trofessions" for a good deal of discursive comment. 

2 Works, XVII, 440, 441. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 225 

interference or inquisition (the limits of both being 
determined by national law), but with the patient 
and gentle watchfulness which true Christian pastors 
now exercise over their flocks; only with a higher legal 
authority. ... of interference on due occasion." ^ 
Instead of continuing to be parasites on society, 
living in epicurean seclusion, bishops were thus to be 
real overseers^ and were to inform themselves as to 
the material condition of their flocks even before they 
attempted to minister to their spiritual welfare. ^ 

It was impossible for Ruskin to discuss the landed 
aristocracy without reference to the land question. 
He was deeply dissatisfied with actual conditions of 
land tenure, and signs of disturbance, in his opinion, 
were as plain here as in the world of industry. The 
holders of land were largely mere rent-receivers, 
gathering the products of others' labors and spending 
them for luxuries; "able-bodied paupers,'* he called 
them, reaping where they had not sowed. Unwilling 
to endure this situation forever, the poor were already 
showing signs of revolt. Unless reforms in land 
tenure were brought about soon, Ruskin urged, 
speaking to English landlords, "You will find your- 
selves in Parliament in front of a majority resolved 
on the establishment of a Republic, and the division 

1 Works, XVII, 378. 

2 Ruskin spoke out boldly and often against the comfortable and com- 
placent professionalism of English bishops, — "with its pride, privilege, 
and more or less roseate repose of domestic felicity. The present Bishops 
of the English Church," he said, " have forfeited and fallen from their 
Bishoprics by transgression; and betrayal of their Lord, first by simony, 
and secondly, and chiefly, by lying for God with one mouth, and contend- 
ing for their own personal interests as a professional body, as if these were 
the cause of Christ." {Works, XXVIII, 364, 514.) 



226 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

of lands." ^ As to fundamental economic principles 
governing tenure, his program was simple and not 
extreme. One of the essential forms of wealth, land 
should not only supply food and mechanical power 
for the use of man; but it should also supply beauty 
for his spirit, exercise for his body, and means for the 
support of animal life, for which uses sufficient 
mountains and moorland should be set apart by 
direction of the state. Since, however, the land is 
limited in quantity, it ought not to be monopolized 
by a favorite few, — "hereditarily sacred persons to 
whom the earth, air, and water of the world belong, 
as personal property." The state must secure "va- 
rious portions" of it to those who can use it properly, 
for the most part leaving them free in the manage- 
ment, — "interfering in cases of gross mismanagement 
or abuse of power," and enforcing upon the holders 
due conditions of possession, such as prevention of 
waste and pollution. ^'The land to those who can use 
it," was thus Ruskin*s ideal, precisely as he had said 
that wealth of all kinds must be dependent upon the 
capacity of its possessor to use it for his own or for 
society's good. Possession of land, therefore, was to 
imply the duty of living upon it and by it, if there 
were enough; and if there were more than enough, 
the duty of making it fruitful and beautiful for as 
many more as it could support. "The owner of land, 
necessarily and justly left in great measure by the 
State to do what he will with his own, is nevertheless 
entirely responsible to the State for the generally 
beneficial management of his territory." 2 In the 

^ Works, XXVIII, 152. ^Ibid., XXIX, 495. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 227 

ideal state Ruskin thought that landlords would be 
paid a fixed salary for superintendence, all the in- 
come derived from the land going back to the tenants 
or for improvements. Under such ideal conditions 
wherein each person possessed only the land he could 
use^ tenure should be hereditary, the property passing 
from father to son strictly in accordance with the law 
of primogeniture; for Ruskin desired to see the agri- 
cultural classes bound to the land as the artisans were 
bound to the guild, bound by ties of tradition and 
group-pride, as well as by personal interest. Land 
nationalization was, therefore, to him nonsense. He 
held for private ownership, albeit private ownership 
under severe responsibilities to the state and under 
the state's constant control. 

Turning from ideal to actual conditions, however, 
Ruskin declared expressly for fixity of rent and se- 
curity for tenants' improvements. He protested 
against the practice of squeezing the tenant for 
increased rent as often as the tenant raised the pro- 
ductivity of the land or improved the buildings, thus 
keeping him down to a uniform level of poverty and 
servitude. • The landlord should voluntarily fix his 
income, live well within it, and put his whole soul 
"into the right employment of the rest for the 
bettering of (his) estates, in ways which the farmers 
for their own use could not or would not.'* ^ Though 
Ruskin, as we have just seen, favored an extension of 
state control over land, under ideal conditions, he was 
slow to advocate by law either immediate redistribu- 
tion of land or limitation of income in the case of 

1 Worksy XXVIII, ISS. 



228 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the landed aristocracy. He much preferred that the 
present holders should not be arbitrarily dispossessed, 
but rather put under further state control; and he 
urged workers of every description to buy land (hav- 
ing got it " by the law of labor, working for it, saving 
for it, and buying it: — but buying never to let go"), 
and to become landowners on their own account, — 
"diminutive squires." He urged the trade-unions 
and co-operative societies to acquire land and to 
make the most of it for the common purpose of their 
organizations, subject always to the laws of the state. ^ 
A gradual redistribution of land by peaceful means 
under law was thus what Ruskin hoped for. A sud- 
den and forced redistribution could not be effected 
"without grave and prolonged civil disturbance," 
and would in itself be of little advantage, besides 
being an unjust arrangement, — a consummation 
devoutly to be avoided. But sure to come, he 
believed, if abuses of landlordism were allowed to 
continue unchecked. 

The great merchants constituted another order of 
the aristocracy. As we have already noticed in a 
previous connection, Ruskin believed that the office 
of merchant should be immensely elevated. It was 
his duty to provide for the people, a duty as sacred 
and as honorable as that of the soldier whose duty it 
was to defend them, or that of the physician and 
lawyer, who must maintain health and enforce justice. 
The merchant was a master producer and organizer, 

1 "A certain quantity of public land must be set aside for public uses 
and pleasure, and especially for purposes of education. " (fForks, XXIX, 
495.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 229 

exercising vast power and therefore bound by equally- 
vast responsibilities. Upon him rested the sacred 
obligation of supplying goods to the public the 
quality of which he could guarantee, if need be, with 
his life; and of caring for his workers (their whole 
status of life both in the shop and at home) with a 
painstaking care that Ruskin could only liken to the 
care of a father for his children. In this function of 
providing for his men, the master should indeed be 
"invested with a distinctly paternal authority and 
responsibility." Here, as everywhere else in Ruskin's 
social philosophy, high ethical ideals must control 
industrial relations. Conditions of mutual trust and 
regard should so much prevail as to give the workers 
^* permanent interest in the establishment with which 
they are connected, like that of the domestic servants 
in an old family, or an esprit de corps ^ like that of the 
soldiers in a crack regiment." ^ Instead of a system 
of profit-sharing, on the one hand, or the current 
wage-system on the other, working under the pressure 
of competition, Ruskin favored an "intermediate 
method, by which every subordinate shall be paid 
sufficient and regular wages, according to his rank; 
by which due provision shall be made out of the 
profits of the business for sick and superannuated 
workers; and by which the master, being held respon- 
sible^ as a minor king or governor^ for the conduct as 
well as the comfort of all those under his rule^ shall, on 
that condition, be permitted to retain to his own use 
the surplus profits of the business which the fact of 
his being its master may be assumed to prove that he 

1 Works, XVII, 33. 



230 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

has organized by superior intellect and energy." ^ It 
is clear from this statement that Ruskin wished to see 
the captains of industry free to make fortunes and to 
reap the rewards of their higher abilities and virtues. 
But as in the case of the landlords, he thought that 
the merchants should voluntarily fix their incomes 
and refuse increase of business beyond defined limits, 
thus "obtaining due freedom of time for better 
thoughts." The maker of fortune should also be the 
spender of it; it should be his aim not to die rich, but 
to live "rich" and die poor, using his wealth, during 
his life, for the well-being of himself and his fellows. 

In an ideal social state, in Ruskin's Utopia, he 
would have the incomes of captains of industry, like 
the incomes of landlords, fixed by law, and he would 
have both classes paid, not for ownership of capital, 
but for stewardship of property and superintendence 
of labor. Thus, he contended, the temptation to 
consume energy in the heaping up of wealth would be 
removed; and when the older men of these upper 
classes, having attained the "prescribed limits of 
wealth from commercial competition," should be 
withdrawn in favor of younger leaders, these older 
men should be induced to serve the state, unselfishly, 
either in parliament, in the superintendence of public 
enterprise, or in the furtherance of the public interest 
wherever their ripe experience would be of service. ^ 
Captains of industry would therefore round out their 
career in the most honorable toil and with the highest 

^ Works, XWll, 319. 

2 The narrow-mindedness and greed of the capitalists of his time Ruskin 
condemned as severely as he did the faults of the landlords and the 
bishops. {E. g. XXVII, 127; XVI, 343n.; XVIII, 415.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 231 

reward. What of the retail merchants, meantime, 
the distributors of commodities, the middlemen? 
These, as we have already pointed out in connection 
with the problem of servile labor, Ruskin would, 
under ideal social conditions, make "salaried officers 
in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards, that 
is to say, of the saleable properties of those guilds, 
and purveyors of such and such articles to a given 
number of families.'* ^ But at this point we come 
to the third and last group in the social order, to the 
skilled and classified workers, to the operatives and 
craftsmen, and to their organization into independent 
communities, or guilds. We here touch upon one of 
the most suggestive and fruitful aspects of Ruskin's 
social philosophy. 

In The Political Economy of Art (1857) he had 
defined political economy as the wise management 
of labor. He made this view of it the central theme 
of Unto This Last^ where he declared that the su- 
preme need of the time was the organization of the 
workers. And in an unpublished epilogue to Fors 
(1884), interesting as a kind of farewell to his work in 
the field of social reconstruction, he returned to the 
problem with the old insistence, lamenting the 
absence of constructive reform in the thing that 
mattered most, the daily toil of the worker. Isolated, 
enslaved to commercialism, the modern operative 
worked for a wage without interest in his labor and 
without a voice in the control of the industry in 
which he was an impersonal unit. Ruskin's social 
ideals were of course impossible of realization in a 
1 Works, XVII, 427. 



232 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

scheme like this. What he wished to see was the 
organization of workers into communities for the 
effective control of their own lives and occupations. 
How far he would go in the way of such community- 
control Ruskin did not say; and he probably had not 
fully thought out. Did he look for an eventual 
disappearance of capitalism and an ultimate owner- 
ship, or control, of the tools of all industry by the 
workers? There are indications here and there that 
he did, as for example in a resolution which he pro- 
posed at a meeting of The National Association for 
the Promotion of Social Science (1868), running as 
follows: "That, in the opinion of this meeting, the 
interests of workmen and their employers are at pres- 
sent opposed, and can only become identical when all 
are equally employed in defined labor and recognized 
duty, and all, from the highest to the lowest, are paid 
fixed salaries, proportional to the value of their 
services and sufficient for their honorable maintenance 
in the situations of life properly occupied by them." ^ 
But in the writings published during his lifetime, 
there is nowhere a completely coherent plan of labor 
organization, such as might be operated in an actual 
community of workers. In the important matter of 
the relation of such communities to the state, Ruskin 
appears to have been of divided mind; for at one time 
he advocated voluntary organizations, wholly inde- 
pendent of the state, while, at another, he set forth a 
plan of workshops that were to be under government 
direction. 

^ Works, XVII, 539. Similar ideas found expression in the Guild of St. 
George, of which more later. 



THE S\yORD OF ST. GEORGE 233 

Many of his ideals of industrial organization go 
back for their inspiration to the medieyal guilds, 
especially to the craft-guilds of thirteenth-century 
Florence. The thirteenth century was to Ruskin, as 
it has been to so many other lovers of the beautiful, 
not merely the century of Dante, Giotto, and St. 
Francis, of the Nibelungen Lied and the Holy Grail, 
but the century also of the cathedral builders and the 
guilds, when art had its roots in industry and when 
industry flowered into the lovliest art of the world. 
"A great age in all ways," said Ruskin; "but most 
notably so in the correspondence it presented, up to 
a just and honorable point, with the utilitarian energy 
of our own days." ^ No other city was so fair a repre- 
sentative of this period as Florence. The view from 
Fiesole was, he thought, the view of all the world, 
and the baptistery "the center of the arts of the 
world"; while the bell-tower of Giotto, whose "spiral 
shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crys- 
talline," were a perpetual delight to his eyes, was 
"the model and mirror of perfect architecture." 
This magnificence of art, both civil and ecclesiastical, 
was the creation of a company of artists whose patrons 
were the public. Side by side with this finer art, there 
flourished an extensive and highly developed do- 
mestic art, the work of "a vast body of craftsmen," 
the artisan class. They were the hand-workers, as- 
sociated together for the production of " a staple of ex- 
cellent, or perhaps inimitable, quality," — the weavers, 
ironsmiths, goldsmiths, carpenters, and stonecut- 
ters, upon whose occupations "the more refined 

1 Works, XXIII, 47. 



234 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

arts were wholesomely based." The artists and 
craftsmen were thus brought together in the same 
workshops and initiated into fellowships in the same 
guilds; the artist never ceased to be a craftsman, 
while, under the guidance and inspiration of his 
masters, the craftsman might one day become an 
artist. In these companies of Florentine guildsmen 
Ruskin found his ideals of art and society in a high 
degree realized. "No distinction," he said of them, 
"exists between artist and artisan except that of 
higher genius or better conduct; the best artist is 
assuredly also the best artisan; and the simplest 
workman uses his invention and emotion as well as 
his fingers." ^ With common traditions and with com- 
mon pride in hereditary skill, industry and art flour- 
ished together in these guilds under the judicious 
patronage of a public intent upon engaging great 
creative energies for the common service. Studio art 
and dilettante craftsmanship, turning out bizarre 
products for aristocratic patrons, were unknown. 
Even the humblest worker lived in an atmosphere 
congenial to the expression of whatever spark of 
creative impulse might be awakened to life within 
him. 

It was no doubt mainly because of this close asso- 
ciation of the arts and crafts in the medieval guilds, 
such as existed in thirteenth-century Florence, that 
the guild-idea as applicable to modern conditions of 
industry came to Ruskin. From his earliest refer- 
ences to the re-establishment of guilds upon a new 
basis, in the lectures called The Political Economy 

1 Worksy XXIII, 52. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 235 

of Art (1857), and in his Cambridge Inaugural Address 
in the following year, it is evident that he first thought 
of them in connection with a better production and 
distribution of art. "I believe it to be wholly im- 
possible/' he said, "to teach special application of 
Art principles to various trades in a single school. 
That special application can be only learned rightly 
by the experience of years in the particular work 
required. The power of each material, and the 
difficulties connected with its treatment, are not so 
much to be taught as to be felt; it is only by repeated 
touch and continued trial before the forge or the fur- 
nace, that the goldsmith can find out how to govern 
his gold, or the glass- worker his crystal; and it is only 
by watching and assisting the actual practice of a 
master in the business, that the apprentice can learn 
the efficient secrets of manipulation, or perceive the 
true limits of the involved conditions of design. . . . 
All specific Art-teaching must be given in schools 
established by each trade for itself. . . . Therefore, 
I believe most firmly, that as the laws of national 
prosperity get familiar to us, we shall more and more 
cast our toil into social and communicative systems; 
and that one of the first means of our doing so, will be 
the re-establishing guilds of every important trade in 
a vital, not formal, condition; — that there will be a 
great council or government house for the members of 
every trade, built in whatever town of the kingdom 
occupies itself principally in such trade, with minor 
council-halls in other cities; and to each council-hall, 
officers attached, whose first business may be to ex- 
amine into the circumstances of every operative, in 



236 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

that trade, who chooses to report himself to them 
when out of work, and to set him to work, if he is 
indeed able and willing, at a fixed rate of wages, 
determined at regular periods in the council-meetings; 
and whose next duty may be to bring reports before 
the council of all improvements made in the business, 
and means of its extension: not allowing private 
patents of any kind, but making all improvements 
available to every member of the guild, only allotting, 
after successful trial of them, a certain reward to 
the inventors." ^ 

Ruskin here brings into clear light the principles of 
medieval craftsmanship as a basis for the modern 
reconstructed workshop, in opposition to private 
schools of design and philanthropic institutes, where 
art is taught not to apprentices but to amateurs, by 
teachers who know nothing of the practical and 
associated craftsmanship of the workshop. But even 
in 1857 he went beyond a statement of principles and 
offered practical suggestions. He proposed the es- 
tablishment by government of a paper manufactory 
for the purpose of producing for artists' use a paper 
of guaranteed quality, purchasable at an extra shil- 
ling above the commercial price. He proposed, also, 
"government establishments for every trade, in 
which all youths who desired it should be received as 
apprentices on their leaving school; and men thrown 
out of work received at all times." ^ A little later, in 
1862, the idea of government workshops — essentially 
guilds under state control — had become more definite 
and inclusive: "manufactories and workshops for the 

1 Worksy XVI, 178, 97. ^Ibid, XVI, 112. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 237 

production and sale of every necessary of life, and for 
the exercise of every useful art. And, interfering no 
whit with private enterprise, nor setting any re- 
straints or tax on private trade, but leaving both to 
do their best, and beat the Government if they could, 
— there should, at these Government manufactories 
and shops, be authoritatively good and exemplary 
work done, and pure and true substance sold; so that 
a man could be sure, if he chose to pay the Govern- 
ment price, that he got for his money bread that was 
bread, ale that was ale, and work that was work." * 
Later still (1867 and after) Ruskin's ideas expanded 
in all directions, in favor of voluntary organizations of 
labor into self-governing communities, or guilds, for 
co-operative effort. "The magnitude of the social 
change hereby involved," he said, "and the conse- 
quent differences in the moral relations between 
individuals, have not as yet been thought of, — much 
less estimated, — by any of your writers on commercial 
subjects." The master bakers in a town, for example, 
instead of destroying one another's business by com- 
petition, should "form one society, selling to the 
public under a common law of severe penalty for 
unjust dealing, and at an established price." Simi- 
larly "all bankers should be members of a great 
national body, answerable as a society for all de- 
posits." Ruskin called upon the workingmen of 
England likewise to band together for the furtherance 
of their own interests by the establishment of a 
council with regular meetings to "deliberate upon 
the possible modes of the regulation of industry, and 

1 Works, XVII, 22. 



238 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

advisablest schemes for helpful discipline of life." * 
Now and again he suggested, tentatively and without 
complete formulation, that the trade unions should 
take over many of the functions of the old guilds; at 
all events that through them the guild idea might be 
adapted to modern industry, the natural and essential 
divisions of labor furnishing a proper basis on which 
to start the new groups. ^ Get these thoroughly 
organized, he said to the workers, "and the world 
is yours, and all the pleasures of it." A necessary 
part of such a voluntary enterprise, he believed, was 
the possession of land, purchased by the thrift and 
toil of the laborers, proportioned to their numbers, 
and owned by them as a corporate body, according to 
the principles of community tenure practiced by the 
monks in medieval times. 

The trade guilds having once been established upon 
such a foundation, their life should go on in obedience 
to certain ideals to be regarded as sacred. First, last, 
and always there must be sound work. The knave 
who should turn out a product that was sham, or 
light in weight, or adulterated, or otherwise dishonest, 
should instantly be dismissed from the guild under 
severe penalties. Ruskin believed, however, that 
when such penalties were backed up by a right public 
opinion, demanding good work and rejecting bad, 
"sham articles would become speedily as rare as 

1 Works, XVII, 3 17, 327. "The Trade Union Congress, often described 
as 'The Parhament of Labor,' first assembled in the year after this pas- 
sage was written (at Manchester in 1868)." 

2 Ruskin named eighteen classes of work "assuredly essential" (the 
various trades necessary for the production of food, buildings, and 
clothing), and three "not superfluous" (the musicians, painters, goltl- 
smiths). (XXIX, 410.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 239 

sound ones are now." To secure these ends a fixed 
standard of product should be established. "This 
would have to be done by the guild of every trade in 
its own manner, and within easily recognizable limits, 
and this fixing of standard would necessitate much 
simplicity in the forms and kinds of articles sold. 
You could only warrant a certain kind of glazing or 
painting in china, a certain quality of leather or cloth, 
bricks of a certain clay, loaves of a defined mixture of 
meal. Advisable improvements or varieties in manu- 
facture would have to be examined and accepted by 
the trade guild: when so accepted, they would be 
announced in public reports; and all puflFery and self- 
proclamation, on the part of tradesmen, absolutely 
forbidden, as much as the making of any other kind 
of noise or disturbance." ^ But this was not to be all. 
The prices of standard or warranted articles "should 
be fixed annually for the trade throughout the king- 
dom." The wages of workmen were likewise to be 
fixed, as also the profits of the masters, — all within 
such limits as the state of the trade would allow. 
Every firm belonging to a guild, moreover, should be 
free to produce other than the warranted class of 
articles, above the standard quality, "whether by skill 
of applied handicraft, or fineness of material above 
the standard of the guild." Finally, the affairs of 
every corporate member should be reported annually 

1 Works i XVII, 384. Merchants and traders outside the guild, said 
Ruskin, should have leave to pufF and advertise and to gull the pubHc as 
much as they could. If people wished to buy of those who refused to 
belong to an honest society, they might do so " at their own pleasure and 
peril." Guilds should also have the stimulus of "erratic external in- 
genuity." 



240 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

to the guild and the books laid open to inspection 
"for guidance in the regulation of prices in the sub- 
sequent year; and any firm whose liabilities exceeded 
its assets by a hundred pounds should be forthwith 
declared bankrupt." ^ 

With these ideals for the organization of labor upon 
the lines of the reconstructed guild, Ruskin's account 
breaks off. It is much to be regretted that he did not 
find time to work out his brilliant suggestions to 
greater fulness and coherence, since no phase of his 
social philosophy is richer in promise and no part 
springs so naturally out of the general soil of his 
thought. The guild in some form, indeed, would 
seem to be the only fit means for the realization of the 
ideals of social reconstruction for which Ruskin stood; 
a plan, in other words, for the co-operation of the 
workers within collectively controlled groups, each 
doing his appointed task in an environment that both 
materially and socially aroused him to his best efforts, 
and each finding his task a natural outlet for his 
instinct for public service and his instinct for self- 
expression. ^ But it was left for others who came 
after to develop the guild-idea in fuller detail as a 
basis for the reorganization of the present industrial 
order, and even to put it to practical test in the form 
of the "reconstructed workshop," an experiment 
which Ruskin would have regarded as full of hope for 
the future. Meantime his restless mind was drawn 

1 Works, XVII, 387. 

2 Ruskin did not overlook, in his guild-ideas, the importance of environ- 
ment for the worker. His guild halls, or social centers, were to be made 
beautiful by paintings and decorations, so as to help estabHsh the worth 
and honorableness of the trades represented. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 241 

aside to still other plans and projects, substantially- 
all of which, at least in general outline, have been set 
before the reader. An account of Ruskin's social 
philosophy would be incomplete, however, without 
some separate consideration of his ideas of the state 
and state control. 

Part II— The Function of the State "^ 

In his visions of a new order Ruskin turned to the 
state as the central source of control. The state, as 
we have seen, should regulate marriage, should 
supply a universal and democratic system of educa- 
tion, and should provide employment for those out 
of work, including forced labor for the idle and 
criminal classes. It should set apart mountain and 
moorland for beauty, for exercise, and for support of 
animal life, and thus assure healthy diversions for its 
people. It should accomplish in the course of time a 
revolution in land tenure, with extended control over 
landholders; it should in the long run fix the incomes 
of landlords and of captains of industry, making both 
classes virtually salaried superintendents. It should 
establish and direct workshops for the manufacture 
and sale of every necessary of life, in rivalry with 
private producers and for the express purpose of set- 
ting up a just standard of quality and price to all 
consumers. Still other forms of state control were 
suggested or discussed from time to time by Ruskin 
in his writings. He advocated old age pensions in 
1857; and at the same time made it plain that he 
favored extensive changes by law in the accepted 
modes of accumulation and distribution of property. 



242 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

In 1863 he urged government ownership of railroads. 
"Neither the roads nor the railroads should belong to 
any private persons," he said; and they should not 
pay dividends, but working expenses only. "Had 
the money spent in local mistakes and vain private 
litigation, on the railroads of England, been laid out, 
instead, under proper government restraint, on really 
useful railroad work, and had no absurd expense been 
incurred in ornamenting stations, we might already 
have had, — what ultimately it will be found we must 
have, — quadruple rails, two for passengers, and two 
for traffic, on every great line; and we might have 
been carried in swift safety, and watched and warded 
by well-paid pointsmen for half the present fares." ^ 

There are evidences also of Ruskin*s belief that not 
railroads only, but all public utilities should be 
"under government administration and security," if 
not under direct state ownership. ^ Very early in his 
literary career he conceived of state control on the 
broadest lines, and from these he never departed.^ 
To a program calling upon the state to make sure 
that its people were properly fed, clothed, and housed 
he often returned, describing in more detailed manner 
than he had in earlier accounts his notion of the 
state's responsibilities. Many of his declarations are 
alike bold and prophetic, as for example certain of 
those in the concluding paragraphs of his lecture on 

^Worksy XVII, 252. 

2 See, for example, his reprinting in Fors for September, 1877, a report of 
the Bread-winner's League in New York. He gave unmistakable assent 
to government ownership of the following: postroads, railroads, gasworks, 
waterworks, mining operations, canals, post-offices, telegraphs, expresses, 
medical assistance. {Works, XXIX, 218; XXVII, 471.) 

3 Works, XI, 263. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 243 

The Mystery of Life and Its Arts (1868), — a lecture 
into which, he said, he had put all that he knew and 
which Sir Leslie Stephen regarded as " the most per- 
fect of his essays/* After driving home the scriptural 
truth that if any man will not work neither shall he 
eat, he speaks of governmental control of food as 
follows: "the first thing is to be sure that you have 
the food to give; and, therefore, to enforce the 
organization of vast activities in agriculture and in 
commerce, for the production of the wholesomest 
food, and proper storing and distribution of it, so that 
no famine shall any more be possible among civilized 
beings." He next takes up the housing problem. 
Providing lodging for the people, he says, "means a 
great deal of vigorous legislature, and cutting down of 
vested interests that stand in the way, and after that, 
or before that, so far as we can get it, thorough sani- 
tary and remedial action in the houses that we have; 
and then the building of more, strongly, beautifully, 
and in groups of limited extent, kept in proportion to 
their streams, and walled round, so that there may be 
no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, but 
clean and busy street within, and the open country 
without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard 
round the walls, so that from any part of the city 
perfectly fresh air and grass, and sight of far horizon, 
might be reachable in a few minutes' walk. This is 
the final aim; but in immediate action every minor 
and possible good to be instantly done, when, and as, 
we can; roofs mended that have holes in them — fences 
patched that have gaps in them — walls buttressed 
that totter — and floors propped that shake; cleanli- 



244 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ness and order enforced with our own hands and 
eyes^ till we are breathless every day. And all the 
fine arts will healthily follow." ^ 

Ruskin knew that such suggestions, plain and 
practical to him, must have appeared chimerical to 
the British business man, whose normal vision of the 
world was that of a vast mob scrambling for wealth 
and trampling down the weak who cumbered his way. 
But he knew, too, that such a man was in truth a self- 
centered pessimist, who opposed all kinds of govern- 
ment interference on principle; and who, knowing 
well both past and present abuses of the state, re- 
fused to believe that they ever could be fewer or 
his fellow men wiser. To Ruskin, however, the 
"notion of Discipline and Interference" lay "at the 
very root of all human progress or power." ^ His 
whole idea of the state, reiterated a hundred times, 
was the idea of a centralized authority, directing, 
guiding, watching, and rewarding its people. In his 
later years he liked to do nothing so much as to draw 
a picture of society in which the energies of man were 
spent, not in the destruction of his fellows, in war, 
but in the conquest of his old-time enemies, — disease, 
want, and ignorance, — and of his ancient and still 
unsubdued environment, the vast waste places of 
earth and the yet vaster forces of nature. For the 
function of government, as he interpreted it, was 
paternalistic. Such a view to him was the most 
natural and the simplest possible. Its principles were 
no more and no less than the principles of the house, 
the farm, or the ship, written large. The French, 
1 Works, XVIII, 183. 2 iiid,^ XVI, 26. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 245 

said he, in their efforts to work out a new social 
system hit upon one true principle, that of brother- 
hood; but in their disastrous experiments they forgot 
that the fact of brotherhood implied also the fact of 
fatherhood: ** that is to say, if they were to regard the 
nation as one family, the condition of unity in that 
family consisted no less in their having a head, or a 
father, than in their being faithful and affectionate 
members, or brothers." ^ 

It may be said that Ruskin's paternalistic govern- 
ment is state socialism pure and simple. In the sense 
that he regarded society as an organic whole, com- 
posed of mutually dependent units, acting together in 
harmony for common ends, under state control, he 
was a socialist. He was a socialist, also, in his burn- 
ing protests against the senseless extravagance and 
irresponsibility of the upper classes; and in his de- 
mand for a reduction of the inequalities of wealth, up- 
on the principle that property and land and tools alike 
belong to those who can use them.^ Moreover his 
stern insistence that economists in the future should 
give the same attention to problems of distribution as, 
in the past, they had given to problems of production, 
was through and through socialistic, a cardinal 
principle of all progressive thinkers from his day to 
ours. But he was not a Christian Socialist after the 
manner of Kingsley and Maurice, who relied more 
upon sentiment than upon law as a means of securing 

1 Works, XVI, 24. 

2 Ruskin had no very definite program for the orderly reduction of 
inequalities of wealth. He relied mostly upon three methods, abolition of 
interest and profits on capital, taxation (including income, property, and 
excise tax on luxuries), and voluntary action. 



246 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

social justice. He was a good deal nearer to the 
revolutionary socialists of the Marxian stripe, not 
only in his occasional prophecy that the crimes and 
follies of the capitalistic classes might precipitate 
power into the hands of the lower orders, but also in 
his bold denunciation of the whole competitive sys- 
tem of industry. Like the Marxists, Ruskin de- 
manded the right to work for all, and theoretically 
adopted, as we have seen, the Marxian principle that 
quantity of labor should determine the price of 
commodities. More than all else he was socialistic in 
the spirit and tendency of much of his program for 
social reform. Every principle for which he contended 
and every practical remedy which he urged was 
inspired, as the best socialistic thought has been 
inspired, by a profound sense of the injustice in the 
present industrial order, and an equally profound 
conviction that justice could come only when the 
work of the world should be organized upon such a 
co-operative basis as to secure to every human being, 
obedient to the higher laws of his nature, that oppor- 
tunity for self-development in labor which is the 
intuitive craving of mankind everywhere. 

But Ruskin was not a leveler. Although he be- 
lieved that " the fortunes of private persons should be 
small," and that large fortunes could "not honestly be 
made by the work of any one man's hands or head," ^ 
he had a vivid sense of the natural inequalities of 
men and of the consequent inevitable inequality in 
their material possessions. He therefore indignantly 
repudiated the suggestion that his social teaching 

^ Works, XXVII, 121 ; XVII, 388. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 247 

implied an equalitarian socialism. "If there be any- 
one point insisted on throughout my works more 
frequently than another," he said, " that one point is 
the impossibility of Equality." ^ He agreed with all 
reformers, of whatever creed or race, that the educa- 
tional system must reach down to every child in the 
state; but he had no sympathy with the desire on the 
part of the lower orders to secure education for the 
purpose of making themselves the upper orders. 
"They will be mightily astonished," he said, "when 
they really get it, to find that it is the fatallest of all 
discerners and enforcers of distinction; piercing, even 
to the division of the joints and marrow, to find out 
wherein your body and soul are less, or greater, than 
other bodies and souls, and to sign deed of separation 
with unequivocal zeal." ^ It was no less a funda- 
mental tenet in his social creed that within certain 
limits the industrial and economic independence of 
each individual should be guaranteed by the state. 
The freedom of the worker must imply a right to the 
economic advantages resulting from his work. It 
will no doubt be a very complex difficulty in the 
national economy to adjust the laws so as to secure 
both a maximum of co-operation and a maximum of 
individual initiative. Nevertheless the creation of 
such laws seemed to Ruskin imperative; laws "which, 
marking the due limits of independent agency, may 
enable it to exist in full energy, not only without 
becoming injurious, but so as more variously and 
perfectly to promote the entire interests of the 
commonwealth." ^ With these foundations to stand 
1 Worksy XVII, 74. ' ibid., XVII, 456. » Ibid., XVII, 375- 



248 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

upon, therefore, he disapproved of land nationaliza- 
tion and the equal division of property. He was a 
communist, he said, but a "Communist of the old 
school, reddest of the red," which meant that every- 
body should work in common for his living; but not 
that everybody should own lands, houses, and per- 
sonal property in common. "Any attempts to com- 
munize these," he said, "have always ended, and will 
always end, in ruin and shame. "^ 

It was Ruskin's distrust of popular government, 
however, that separated him furthest from socialistic 
or radical thought of all kinds. Like Carlyle, he had 
a deep-rooted disbelief in the ability of the people to 
exercise political power. Democracy meant the over- 
throw of government and the rule of the mob, with 
everybody scrambling to be uppermost; it meant the 
vast upheaval of an untamed populace, believing in 
magnitude instead of nobleness, and totally ignorant 
of the higher arts and amenities of life. Ruskin 

1 WorkSf XVII, 487. Cf. ibid.y 266, 192-3, intro. CIX. Ruskin never 
attempted to say how far the independence and superior abihty of an 
individual should be permitted to go in the accumulation of private 
property. He was no doubt wise in this, since the problem taken theoret- 
ically seems hopeless. Time and education and actual conditions must 
bring the solution nearer from generation to generation. On two points, 
moreover, he was clear and consistent: the right of a person, within limits, 
to what he earned; and the necessity for Hmitation of large incomes. As 
to whether such limitation should be compulsory or voluntary, he wav- 
ered, now favoring the one method, now the other. In either case he 
recognized the difficulty: "no action can be taken in redistribution of land 
or in limitation of the incomes of the upper classes, without grave and 
prolonged civil disturbance." {Works, XVII, 436.) What he undoubtedly 
hoped for was a gradual change in the social consciousness toward riches, 
together with a tax on incomes and a tax on luxuries, so that in the end 
superior ability would be paid a reasonable salary for superintendence, 
but would not wish to, nor be permitted to, have its reward in large 
personal property. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 249 

identified political liberty with licence, or the aban- 
donment of illiterate masses to their appetites. For 
the machinery of popular government, — the party 
system, elections, parliaments, — he had almost noth- 
ing but scorn and derision. "If you have read any 
of my late works (any of my political works at all, 
lately or long since written),'' he wrote to a corre- 
spondent in 1869, "you must have seen that they all 
speak with supreme contempt of the 'British Consti- 
tution, ' of elections and popular opinion, and, above 
all, of 'Liberty.' . . . The wisest system of voting 
that human brains could devise would be of no use as 
long as the majority of the voters were fools, which is 
manifestly as yet the fact." ^ All these instrumental- 
ities of democracy were to him synonymous with 
popular disturbances, with hypocrisies, with endless 
balancing of conflicting personal interests, and with 
bribery and corruption on a wide scale. At the 
moment when Disraeli was introducing the Reform 
Bill of 1867 into Parliament, Ruskin challenged the 
workingmen of England to say if they had intelligent 
convictions upon the great questions of labor and 
national policy: "your voices are not worth a rat's 
squeak, either in Parliament or out of it, till you have 
some ideas to utter with them." ^ He accepted 
universal suffrage as inevitable, but he believed that 
the electors of a nation should have votes propor- 
tional to their education, age, wealth, and position, so 
that the populace could be kept in its place. ^ 

» Works, XVII, 3260. 
2 /^iJ., XVII, 326. 

3 " I should be very glad if it were possible to keep the common people 
from thinking about government, but, since the invention of printing, it 



250 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

His outlook upon the political movements of his 
day thus corresponded exactly with Carlyle's. By 
gross misgovernment the aristocracy had deservedly 
lost the respect of the lower orders, who were now 
threatening to overthrow the constitution and to 
substitute a republic, which Ruskin could only look 
upon as political anarchy. As he read the signs of 
the times, if this movement went on unchecked, with 
increasing extravagance among the upper classes and 
with increased license among the lower, the only way 
out, after the populace had had its day of democracy, 
was to set up, for a time, a military despotism as the 
forerunner of genuine reconstruction, — a Carlylean 
interpretation of events through and through.^ 
Ruskin's distrust of the capacity of the people for 
political power, therefore, implies the same curious 
paradox that we found in Carlyle, — a bold and 
pioneer championship of the workers against oppres- 
sion of every kind and a well-nigh fanatical opposition 
to all their efforts to secure political freedom as a 
basis and guarantee of social reform. Despite his 
belief in universal education, when he came to con- 
sider the larger matters of state administration and 
control, he could not conquer the conviction that for 

is not — of all impossibilities that is now the most so; the only question is 
how to make them of exactly the proper weight in the State, and no 
more." {Works, XII, intro. LXXXIIL) C/. XVII, 253; XXXIV, 499, 

^"A nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by des- 
potism — never by talking, nor by its free effort. . . . The Brit- 
ish Constitution is breaking fast. . . . The gipsy hunt is up 
also; . . . and the hue and cry loud against your land and you; 
your tenure of it is in dispute before a multiplying mob." {Works, 
XVIII, 484; XXVIII, 152, 151; C/. XVII, 264; XVIII, 497; XXVIII, 

152-) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 251 

these higher responsibilities the masses of mankind 
would remain unfit. ^ 

Politically speaking, Ruskin could see an ordered 
society only as made up of two classes, — the lordly 
and the servile, those born to rule and those born to 
be ruled; and " the whole health of the state," he said, 
"depends on the manifest separation of these two 
elements." ^ Every man in the kingdom should be 
"equally well educated" with every other; yet the 
result would only bring into clearer light the eternal 
differences among men. There was not a sentence in 
his writings, Ruskin declared in 1884, "implying 
that the education of all should be alike, or that there 
is to be no distinction of master from servant, or of 
scholar from clown." ^ In i860 he appeared before a 
parliamentary committee to testify as to his teaching 
in the Working Men's College, and when asked if he 
did not think that the desire to rise out of their class 
was almost inseparable from the instruction that the 
men received from him, he replied: "I should think 
not; I think that the moment a man desires to rise 

^ The agreement of Ruskin with Carlyle on political principles is shown 
in the following strongly Carlylean passages: "The essential thing for all 
creatures is to be made to do right; how they are made to do it — by 
pleasant promises, or hard necessities, pathetic oratory, or the whip — is 
comparatively immaterial." (XVII, 255.) "Religion, primarily, means 
'Obedience' — bending to something, or some one." (XXVIII, 156.) 
"The wise man knows his master. Less or more wise, he perceives lower 
or higher masters; but always some creature larger than himself — some 
law hoUer than his own. " (XXVIII, 343.) "Of all the puppet-shows in the 
Satanic carnival of the earth, the most contemptible puppet-show is a 
Parliament with a mob pulling the strings." (XII, 552.) "In the modern 
Liberal there is a new and wonderful form of misguidance." (XXVII, 
I79-) 0"- passage on the fly as a type of liberty, — ^XIX, 123. 

2 Works, XVII, 236. Cf. ibid.y 228. 

3 Ibid.y XXIX, 499. 



252 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

out of his own class, he does his work badly in it; he 
ought to desire to rise in his own class, and not out of 
it." ^ It was the duty of such men — the workers, the 
servers — to stick to their appointed tasks like good 
soldiers, and not to meddle with politics and problems 
of government. It was their duty to render to their 
superiors obedience and reverence; for Ruskin, like 
Carlyle, regarded these virtues as the rocks upon 
which all sound politics must forever rest. Just as 
the elements of the universe, the stars, the earth in 
its revolutions, the waters of the sea, act in obedience 
to law, so, too, should inferior men respect the au- 
thority of superior men, venerate the good in them, 
be faithful to them in appointed duties, — in a word 
be utterly loyal in all the relations of life. 

In politics it is clear that Ruskin was an aristocrat 
and conservative, bred in the bone, dyed in the blood. 
He called himself "a violent Illiberar*; "I am, and 
my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old 
school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and 
Homer's),'* ^ From Scott and Homer in boyhood, 
just as from Plato and Carlyle in maturity, he 
imbibed eternal fidelity to conservatism and "strange 
ideas about kings." ^ His long study of art, moreover, 
taught him the significance of distinctions, the 
immense superiority of a Turner, for example, over a 

1 Works, XVI, 474. Cf. XVII, 397. 

Hbid., XXVII, 167. 

3 Although Ruskin's sober convictions were undoubtedly in favor of a 
governing aristocracy of intellect, he retained to the end of his days a 
romantic and aesthetic reverence for old castles and for the distinctions of 
a more or less feudalistic social order. "I hate republicans, as I do all 
other manner of fools," he once said in whimsical irritation. "I love 
Lords and Ladies; and Earls and Countesses, and Marquises and Mar- 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 253 

Stanfield. It was thus inevitable for him to look to 
the aristocracy to be the rulers and lawgivers of the 
state. "To them," he said, "be they few or many, 
we English people call for help to the v/retchedness, 
and for rule over the baseness, of multitudes desolate 
and deceived, shrieking to one another this new gospel 
of their new religion: 'let the weak do as they can, 
and the wicked as they will*. . . . The office of the 
upper classes, as a body, is to keep order among their 
inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level 
with themselves of which these inferiors are capable. 
So far as they are thus occupied, they are invariably 
loved and reverenced intensely by all beneath them, 
and reach, themselves, the highest types of human 
power and beauty." ^ 

Apart from the condition that the rulers, at peril 
of their places, were to rule the people wisely, and 
were not to represent them, Ruskin was not much 
concerned about the form of government. The 
central authority might be vested in king, council, or 
parliament, according to the genius and tradition of 
the nation concerned. "The stuff of which the nation 
is made is developed by the effort and the fate of 
ages," he declared; "according to that material, such 

chionesses, and Honorables, and Sirs" {Works ^ XXVIII, 547.) He 
showed the violence of his toryism more than once in his championship 
of strong authority, as well as in his contempt of popular struggles for 
liberty, such as were going on in America 1861-1865. 

^ Works, XVIII, 499; XVII, 430. In his lecture on The Future of 
England (1869) Ruskin pointed out that no answer had come to the 
question put by the Saturday Review, * *What is to become of the House of 
Lords?"; and therefore "it seems thus to become needful for all men to 
tell them, as our one quite clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has been telling 
us for many a year, that the use of the Lords of a country is to govern the 
country," (XVIII, 498.) 



254 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

and such government becomes possible to it, or 
impossible." ^ His view is characteristically British 
at this point; for he conceived of the forms of govern- 
ment as of slow growth. The structure of a state 
might be blown up, like a ship, in the twinkling of an 
eye; but to build up a code of laws, to appoint means 
for their execution, to stabilize the vast mechanism 
of a state, — this could not be done in an instant, by 
beat of drum. Let particular forms of government, 
however, be what they might, any form would work 
provided its purpose was ^'' the production and recog- 
nition of human worthy and the detection and extinc- 
tion of human unworthiness." ^ 

But how is the state to accomplish this great 
purpose, so as to effect progress? Where are the 
leaders to be found who will lead, and how are the 
''people'* to be induced to follow them obediently and 
reverently? What is to give society its initial push in 
the right direction, so that it can begin its upward 
march out of the slough into which it has fallen? 
These are the final challenging questions that we 
must put to Ruskin, as we did to Carlyle. No man 
saw the social injustice in the work about him with 
clearer vision than Ruskin, and no man, not even 
Carlyle, hurled against it stronger attacks, sustained 
year after year, with blow upon blow. "The people," 
he said, "have begun to suspect that one particular 
form of misgovernment has been that their masters 
have set them to do all the work and have themselves 
taken all the wages. In a word, that what was called 
governing them meant only wearing fine clothes and 

^ Works, XXVII, 235. ^Ihid., XVII, 446. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 255 

living on good fare at their expense. And I am sorry 
to say, the people are quite right in this opinion too. 
If you enquire into the vital fact of the matter, 
this you will find to be the constant structure of 
European society for the thousand years of the feudal 
system; it was divided into peasants who lived by 
digging; priests who lived by begging; and knights 
who lived by pillaging; and as the luminous public 
mind becomes fully cognizant of these facts, it will 
assuredly not suffer things to be altogether arranged 
that way any more." ^ So spoke the prophet, and so 
he spoke with increasing vehemence in his later years. 
In the spirit of a prophet, too, he turned from the 
democratic movements of the day as a means of 
carrying out his elaborate and far sighted plans of 
industrial reconstruction, and called upon a wayward 
people "to repent." In other words, industrial reform 
was really to be set going not by political changes 
first of all, nor by a collective sanction of legal means, 
but by a voluntary reformation of the individual. As 
Professor Hobson justly points out, Ruskin thus 
found "the spring of progress in the individual will." 
"All effectual advancement towards this true felicity 
of the human race," said Ruskin, "must be by indi- 
vidual effort. Certain general measures may aid, 
certain revised laws guide, such advancement; but 
the measure and law which have first to be determined 
are those of each man's home." ^ 

He, therefore, first appealed to the aristocracy to 
change their ways before the rising floods of anarchic 
democracy overwhelmed them. To the rich every- 

1 Works, XVIII, 496. 2 ii,i^^^ XVII, III. 



2s6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

where he said in effect: "see for yourselves what 
degradation your extravagance is bringing upon 
multitudes of mankind who toil in filthy factories and 
swarm in crowded tenements; and seeing, be strong 
enough to sacrifice all convenience, beauty, or cheap- 
ness that you get through such degradation, and to 
live with as little aid from the lower trades as you 
possibly can contrive." As an interesting illustration 
of what could be done through individual initiative 
of this kind, Ruskin instanced the way in which he 
believed that the misery in the crowded suburbs of so 
vast a city as London might be relieved: "any man of 
influence who had the sense and courage to refuse 
himself and his family one London season — to stay on 
his estate, and employ the shopkeepers in his own 
village, instead of those in Bond Street — ^would be 
practically dealing with, and conquering, this evil, so 
far as in him lay; and contributing with his whole 
might to the thorough and final conquest of it." ^ He 
called upon the landlords, as we have seen, volun- 
tarily to fix their rents upon a just basis and to guar- 
antee to their tenants a fair compensation for im- 
provements. He called upon them, also, voluntarily 
to fix their incomes within reasonable limits, setting 
aside all surplus for the benefit of land and tenants. 
His demand upon the captains of industry was of like 
character. "Treat your ordinary workmen," he said 
to them, "exactly as you would treat your son if he 
were in their position": "this is the only efifective, 
true, or practical rule which can be given on this point 
of political economy." Addressing the students of 
1 Works, XXVII, 175. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 257 

the Royal Military Academy in 1869 — young men of 
the upper classes, — he told them in vivid language of 
the evil times on which they had fallen. "Whose 
fault is it?" he asked. "Yours, gentlemen, yours 
only. You alone can feed (the people), and clothe, 
and bring into their right minds, for you only can 
govern." He thereupon appealed to these aristo- 
cratic youths to lead in all reform — in education, in 
social betterment, — and to begin by showing the 
masses how to spend. Through such leadership must 
England be saved: "so and no otherwise can we meet 
existent distress." ^ 

Ruskin's last word to the workers was likewise an 
appeal to the individual. "If you will have the 
upper classes do their duty," he said, "see that you 
also do yours. See that you can obey good laws, 
and good lords, or law-wards, if you once get them — 
that you believe in goodness enough to know what a 
good law is. A good law is one that holds, whether 
you recognize or pronounce it or not; a bad law is one 
that cannot hold, however much you ordain and 
pronounce it. That is the mighty truth which 
Carlyle has been telling you for a quarter of a cen- 
tury."2 He appealed to the lower classes to make 
the three-fold promise: to do their work well, whether 
for life or death, to help others at their work and to 
seek to avenge no injury, and to obey good laws 
before trying to alter bad ones. Such was all the law 
and all the prophets. Political salvation for the 
workers, therefore, was summed in the command, 
''Find your true superiors, reverence their worth, obey 
^ Works, XVIII, S02, 508. ^Ibid., XXVII, 178. 



258 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

their word, and stick to your task"; — a truly astonish- 
ing conclusion to a social program of which much 
was and still remains so splendidly idealistic and 
revolutionary. 

Part III — Utopia 

But the prophet believed in his message to the 
uttermost, and through many years and in various 
ways he strove to show to the world his faith by his 
works. Nothing angered him more than the re- 
proach of sentimentality or the insinuation that all 
his ideals and schemes were at best no better than 
beautiful dreams. Of his burning sensitiveness to the 
miseries and follies of mankind, we have had abun- 
dant evidence in the preceding pages; his '*pervi- 
vacity" of temperament, as he called it, is conspicu- 
ous everywhere. ^ He was fairly maddened, therefore, 
to find his visions of a better social order regarded as 
insubstantial as a mirage, and to have his political 
economy dismissed contemptuously as "effeminate 
sentimentality." 

Against such insinuations Ruskin insisted upon his 
"intensely practical and matter-of-fact" nature. 
Above all things he wished that the public should not 
consider him a mere theorist and doctrinaire, paint- 
ing word-pictures lovely to read, but with no real 
message to men. Readers of Modern Painters will 
recall that in the prefaces to the first and third vol- 

1 The heart of Dean Swift was not more swept by the fires of indigna- 
tion. " I have been reading Dean Swift's Life," he wrote to his mother in 
1869, "and Gulliver's Travels again. Putting the dehght in dirt, which is 
a mere disease, aside, Swift is very like me, in most things, in opinions 
exactly the same." (Cook, Life, II, 547.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 259 

umes he seemed to anticipate Whistler*s sneer about 
a man's talking for forty years of what he has never 
done, when he referred to his long study of practical 
art and pointed out his share in the drawings and 
illustrations for the work. It was the same with the 
crafts and the rougher forms of labor. "Half my 
power of ascertaining facts of any kind connected with 
the arts/' he said, "is my stern habit of doing the 
thing with my own hands till I know its difficulty; and 
though I have no time nor wish to acquire showy skill 
in anything, I make myself clear as to what the skill 
means, and is. Thus, when I had to direct road- 
making at Oxford, I sate, myself, with an iron-masked 
stone-breaker, on his heap, to break stones beside the 
London road, just under Iffley Hill, till I knew how to 
advise my too impetuous pupils to effect their pur- 
pose in that matter, instead of breaking the heads of 
their hammers off (a serious item in our daily ex- 
penses). I learned from an Irish street crossing- 
sweeper what he could teach me of sweeping; but 
found myself in that matter nearly his match, from 
my boy-gardening; and again and again I swept bits 
of St. Giles' foot-pavements, showing my corps of 
subordinates how to finish into depths of gutter. I 
worked with a carpenter until I could take an even 
shaving six feet long off a board; and painted enough 
with properly and delightfully soppy green paint to 
feel the master's superiority in the use of a blunt 
brush. But among all these and other such student- 
ships, the reader will be surprised, I think, to hear, 
seriously, that the instrument I finally decided to be 
the most difficult of management was the trowel. 



26o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

For accumulated months of my boy's life I watched 
bricklaying and paving; but when I took the trowel 
into my own hand, abandoned at once all hope of 
attaining the least real skill with it, unless I gave up 
all thoughts of any future literary or political career." ^ 
Ruskin's life is filled with what his biographer calls 
his '^passion for practice," from the planting and 
pruning and cultivating of trees at Coniston, from his 
treatment of domestic servants and his numberless 
private benefactions in money and books and pic- 
tures, to his active interest in the educational life of 
various institutions, including his establishment of 
the Ruskin drawing school at Oxford, with its fine 
collection of specimens. It was the same with his 
social experiments. He was not content to state what 
must be done. He wished to demonstrate a method 
of realization. He disclaimed any intention of setting 
himself up "either for a champion or a leader," but 
he believed that some example of what he knew to be 
necessary might convince others, better qualified to 
lead, of the feasibility of his ideals. And so it came 
about during the active period of his life that Ruskin, 
"the Don Quixote of Denmark Hill," as he playfully 
called himself, was occupied with various experiments 
in social reform, some undertaken independently, 
some in co-operation with others, but all in the ardent 
effort to point out to a perverse generation what 
might be effected toward the realization of beauty 
and love and justice in an actual world. 

One of the earliest movements with which he was 
associated was the Working Men's College, started 

1 Works, XXXV, 427. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 261 

by F. D. Maurice in 1854, for the laboring classes in 
East London. Established at a time when education 
(except in the most elementary form) did not reach 
the common people, it was the aim of the college to 
bring to a segment of the masses at least the same 
kind of education that the upper classes enjoyed. 
Dr. F. J. Furnivall, "a humble disciple and friend'* 
of Ruskin, sent him a prospectus of the enterprise, 
and Ruskin responded with an offer to Maurice to 
take the classes in art. His chapter on '*The Nature 
of Gothic,** through FurnivalFs initiative, was dis- 
tributed as a manifesto to all who came to the opening 
meeting on October 31. Inspired by Ruskin*s ex- 
ample, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, 
and others volunteered their services for longer or 
shorter periods. With the exception of summer 
terms, when his attendance was irregular, Ruskin 
taught drawing classes in the college from 1854 until 
May, 1858, returning again for a term in the spring of 
i860. He was from the first an enthusiastic and 
successful teacher, if we may judge from such ac- 
counts as have come to us, — "wildly popular with the 
men'* and an "eloquent** talker, as Ford Madox 
Brown declared. To his classroom he brought a 
wealth of illustrative material from the Denmark 
Hill home, — precious stones, bird-plumage, draw- 
ings, missals, even some of the treasured Turners, 
and always liberal supplies of the best drawing paper. 
In suitable weather sketching expeditions to the open 
country around Denmark Hill were frequent, con- 
cluding with luncheon there or at some convenient 
inn. It needs scarcely to be said that Ruskin under- 



262 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

took this work, not in the spirit of the aristocratic 
trifler, carried away by a whim of fashion, but in the 
spirit of a reformer, who saw in the Working Men's 
College an organized effort to offset the crushing 
results of competitive industry, by bringing to the 
men who could not rise out of their class a means of 
being happier within it. In spite of this interpreta- 
tion of purpose, however, many of Ruskin's pupils 
won for themselves no little distinction in fields of 
work to which they felt called as a result of his 
inspiration.^ It is interesting to know that out of his 
intimate personal contact with his students there 
came to him an idea, which he called his *' Protestant 
Convent Plan," of establishing a community of crafts- 
men. Although nothing came of the scheme, one 
seems to catch from it a glimpse of the guild idea, 
which was first mentioned in a lecture in 1857, at a 
time when his teaching at the college was a fresh and 
vivid experience. 

Another famous instance of the fascination which 
Ruskin exercised over young men (how different from 
the East London group !) was the quixotic experiment 
in road mending at Oxford by a company of under- 
graduates, since known to all the world as the Hink- 
sey Diggers. As Slade Professor he was a familiar 
and notable figure at the University for many years, 
lecturing ostensibly upon art, but more often digres- 

* "George Allen as a mezzotint engraver," says CoUingwood, "Arthur 
Burgess as a draughtsman and woodcutter, John Bunney as a painter of 
architectural detail, W. Jeffrey as an artistic photographer, E. Cooke as a 
teacher, WiUiam Ward as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose 
value deserves acknowledgment, all the more because it was not aimed at 
popular effect." (fForks, V, intro., XLI.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 263 

sing in whimsical fashion into all manner of uncon- 
ventional subjects, chiefly social and economic. It 
was these digressions that had the most telling effect 
upon the undergraduate mind. On one occasion, 
according to an account by one of the ** diggers," 
Ruskin dropped some remarks "about the waste 
of time he noticed in the Oxford world of athletics. 
He could not but believe that the same training of 
muscles might be turned to better account, if only the 
young men, as they labored to increase the muscles of 
their biceps and forearms, would try to help others 
round them to a happier life. . . . He instanced 
the need of good roads in a neighboring village." ^ He 
instanced a further purpose. He wished that these 
Oxford young men, who lived in a world so different, 
might understand for themselves, however faintly, 
the meaning of a life of toil. The suggestion awoke a 
response. A group of twelve Balliol men met the 
Professor at breakfasts in his college rooms, where 
arrangements were completed and allegiance was 
sworn. There was a stretch of green near Ferry 
Hinksey, two miles out of Oxford, much damaged by 
the ruts of carts that went over it for lack of road. 
Ruskin obtained permission to build a road through 
this green, — "a Human Pathway," it was to be, 
"rightly made through a lovely country, and rightly 
adorned." Thither, in the first summer term of 1874, 
the young disciples went, "sixty men, in relays of 
twenties, on two days each week," handling pick and 
barrow and spade in obedience to the Master, who 

^Atlantic Monthly^ V. 85, p. 573. The unsigned article was probably 
written by Canon Rawnsley. 



264 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

was then absent in Italy. Later, Ruskin often joined 
them, directing and applauding their efforts with the 
zeal of one who was conscious of trying to break 
something far harder than a new road, — the rigid 
crust of Oxford tradition. The experiment was of 
course the butt of jokers and cartoonists. Dons came 
to scoff, and village loafers to jeer. "A mile or so of 
road was laid out," says Dean Kitchin; "it led to 
nowhere in particular, unless it had been intended to 
lead to a comely farm on the hillside; and even that 
it did not reach. When I saw the road, about a year or 
so after, it showed obvious signs of decay. No pru- 
dent farmer would have brought his carts over it; he 
would have stuck to the turf of the open meadow." ^ 
Ruskin himself was heard to admit that his road 
was "about the worst in the three kingdoms." 

But the Hinksey digging had results that were far 
from ridiculous. It brought a number of promising 
undergraduates into intimate touch with Ruskin, who 
on the walks to and from Hinksey and at the break- 
fasts in his rooms at Corpus Christi unfolded to them, 
as master to disciples, his hopes and fears for the 
future. The talk was free and plenteous and brilliant 
upon all manner of questions relating to art and 
society. Among the undergraduate followers was 
Arnold Toynbee, a foreman among the diggers, a 
young man of gifted mind and rarely beautiful 
character, whose passion for social service among the 
people was quickened through his contact with 
Ruskin. Described by those who knew him best as 
one who combined the mystical ardor of a medieval 

^ Ruskin in Oxford^ 45. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 265 

saint with the desire to serve his fellow men in his 
own time, Toynbee was just the man upon whom 
Ruskin's influence might fall with most effect. And 
it is indeed diflicult not to believe that his later work 
both among the East London poor and as a lecturer 
on economic questions owed much to the inspiration 
of the "digging-parties/' where, as Ruskin's biog- 
rapher says, "the seeds were sown, or watered, of 
that practical interest in social questions which was 
to be the next Oxford Movement.*' ^ For Ruskin was 
a dreamer of Utopias among his Oxford students, 
even as he had been a dreamer twenty years before 
among the Londoners who gathered about him at the 
Working Men's College; and in a letter to one of the 
Hinksey Diggers he gave expression to one of his 
dreams. It was a hope that some of them might 
"band themselves together, one day, and go out in a 
kind of Benedictine brotherhood to cultivate waste 
places and make life tolerable in our great cities for 
the children of the poor." 2 

To show what could be done for the poor in great 
cities he made three experiments in the crowded 
districts of London. One was street-cleaning. Rus- 
kin secured permission from the local authorities "in 
the pleasant environs of Church Lane, St. Giles's," 
to exhibit to the populace for a quarter of a mile 
square, "without leaving so much as a bit of orange 
peel in the footway, or an egg shell in the gutters." 
In January, 1872, he assembled a small troupe of 
sweepers, including his faithful gardener as foreman, 

1 Cook, Life oj Ruskin^ II, 190. 

2 Atlantic Monthly ^ V. 85, pp. 572-6. 



266 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

and himself led ofF on the job, broom in hand. The 
enterprise appears to have collapsed early. "I 
failed/' said Ruskin, "partly because I chose too 
difficult a district to begin with (the contributions of 
transitional mud being constant, and the inhabitants 
passive), but chiefly because I could no more be on 
the spot myself, to give spirit to the men, when I left 
Denmark Hill for Coniston.'* ^ The next experiment 
was a tea-shop in Paddington, St. Marylebone. 
Ruskin's purpose, he said, was " to supply the poor in 
that neighborhood with pure tea, in packets as small 
as they chose t6 buy, without making a profit on the 
subdivision." 2 Over the door was placed a sign, 
''Mr. Ruskin's Tea-Shop" (painted by Mr. Arthur 
Severn), the window was ornamented with old china 
"bought at Siena," and two of his mother's old 
servants were put in charge. The business ran, with 
diminishing returns, for two years (1874-76), and was 
then given up after the death of one of the keepers. 
But long before the shop was closed Ruskin had come 
to the conclusion that he could not successfully 
compete with the other more brilliantly lighted shops 
or with the increasing consumption in the neighbor- 
hood of less innocent liquids than tea. 

A far wiser effort in social welfare was an experi- 
ment in ''model landlordism" in the worst part of 
London, carried out under the management of Miss 
Octavia Hill, a young woman whose passion for ser- 
vice found its opportunity through her early enthusi- 
asm for Ruskin. He had long felt that the rents 
exacted from the ignorant and necessitous poor were 

1 Works, XXVIII, 204. 2 iiid. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 267 

outrageous. "The most wretched houses of the poor 
in London/' he said, "often pay ten or fifteen per cent 
to the landlord; and I have known an instance of 
sanitary legislation being hindered, to the loss of many 
hundreds of lives, in order that the rents of a noble- 
man, derived from the necessities of the poor, might 
not be diminished." ^ Ruskin had inherited from his 
father some small tenements, and he now bought still 
others. These he intrusted to the stewardship of Miss 
Hill, in order to try what change in the comforts and 
habits of the tenants he could effect " by taking only a 
just rent, but that firmly." 2 If the idea was his, the 
successful realization of it was due to Miss Hill. She 
worked without pay and she made it her business to 
keep in personal touch with her tenants. To them the 
benefits were almost immediate. Profits were spent 
in improvements, overcrowding was much reduced, 
decency and cleanliness were made possible, and the 
people themselves began to rise in self-respect and 
independence. Miss Hill managed these tenements 
for Ruskin during many years, but finally he sold 
them to her, after an estrangement between them, 
because she had spoken of him as "unpractical," an 
epithet which, of all that she might have applied to a 
disappointed and tormented spirit, "was the fatal- 
est." In spite of this unfortunate experience, he was 
highly and justly gratified with the experiment, and 
hoped that other landlords would follow his example. 
But he was under no illusion concerning its temporary 
character. "The best that can be done in this way," 

1 Works, XVII, 437. 

2 The leasehold property paid him five per cent; the freehold, three. 



268 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

he said, "will be useless ultimately, unless the deep 
source of the misery be cut off." 

But the attacks upon competitive commercialism 
went on, regardless of the shouts of ridicule that rose 
from the philistines. While he had strength to fight 
Ruskin delivered one assault after another upon the 
strongholds of modern business, always hoping, with 
a kind of forlorn hope, that others, stronger and wiser, 
would enlist in the struggle until the enemy would 
be compelled to capitulate. Like the experiment in 
model housing, and contrary to expectation, his next 
undertaking proved highly successful. When Fors 
Clavigera was started in 1871, it was to be a protest 
against the ways of the modern world of commerce; 
for one thing, against advertising (puffery), discounts, 
and credits. These evils, it seemed to Ruskin, were 
concentrated in the book business, with consequent 
injustice alike to authors and public. He therefore 
decided to issue Fors (which was to appear monthly 
at seven pence per copy) at a fixed price both to trade 
and consumers, allowing no discounts and no credit 
even for purchases in quantity. "This absolute 
refusal of credit, or abatement," said he, "is only the 
carrying out of a part of any general method of 
political economy; and I adopt this system of sale 
because I think authors ought not to be too proud to 
sell their own books any more than painters to sell 
their own pictures." ^ The plan, begun for Fors^ was 
gradually expanded to include all of Ruskin's works. 
At first his old publishers. Smith, Elder, and Co., with 
the co-operation of George Allen, one of the students 

1 Works, XXVII, 257. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 269 

in the drawing classes at the Working Men's College, 
undertook to carry out the enterprise. In 1873 ^^e 
entire management was turned over to Mr. Allen, who 
set up the publishing business at Orpington, Kent, 
twelve miles out of London, in his cottage '* Sunny- 
side," — "standing in its own grounds, which slope 
down into one of the prettiest vales of Kent.'' The 
printing was likewise done in the country, at Ayles- 
bury, by Messrs. Hazell, Watson, and Viney, who 
had, says Mr. Allen, "quite an ideal printing-office — 
with light and cheerful buildings, allotment gardens, 
recreation-ground, clubs, a magazine, and all the 
other machinery for 'mutual improvement.' " Rus- 
kin's ideal was the establishment of a happy village 
industry, wherefrom the middleman should be 
eliminated, and where books should be supplied at 
fixed prices to all purchasers, — the producer answer- 
ing to the best of his power for the quality of the 
product, "paper, binding, eloquence, and all"; and 
the retail dealer charging "what he ought to charge, 
openly." ^ On this basis the plan was so bitterly 
opposed by the booksellers, resulting in a boycott of 
his books, that in 1882 Ruskin agreed to a modifica- 
tion. For the fixed price to all purchasers, leaving the 
booksellers to add their own profit if they chose, he 
now substituted a fixed price at which the books 
should be retailed to the public, and allowed the trade 
a fixed discount. He thus became the pioneer of the 
"net book system." Under the wise control of Mr. 
Allen the business prospered. ^ One of his greatest 

^ Works, XXVII, 100. 

2 "Last year (1886) I was able to pay over to Mr. Ruskin, as his 



270 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

achievements in Ruskin's lifetime was the 1888 
edition of Modern Painters (actually issued in May, 
1889), from which it was estimated that Ruskin^s 
share in the profits was not less than £6,000. The 
enterprise was carried out in a way that must have 
delighted its originator (then too feeble in health to 
take an active part in it), — under the best of working 
conditions, without stint in labor or cost of material, 
and with the sole purpose of delivering to the public 
a guaranteed article. "I need not add," says Mr. 
Allen, "that (there) was no machine-stitching about 
it, but only honest hand-work.'* ^ 

profit, £4,000." For many years the profits were as much as 
this. 

1 Carlyle once visited the publishing plant at Orpington, and afterwards 
wrote to Emerson of Ruskin's "strange ways towards the bibliopoHc 
world." 

As a result of his frequent visits to the Alps and Italy, Ruskin became 
greatly absorbed for a time in an irrigation project. He noted with dis- 
may the constant waste and destruction caused by floods from Alpine 
torrents, such as the Arve, the Adige, the Ticino, the Rhone, and even the 
Tiber. In 1869 he was full of a scheme for building reservoirs on the 
upper reaches for use in prevention of floods and for irrigation. He tried 
to interest the Alpine Club. On his visits to Carlyle he poured out his 
plans. "One day," said Carlyle to Froude, "by express desire on both 
sides, I had Ruskin for some hours, really interesting and entertaining. 
He is full of projects, of generous prospective activities, some of which I 
opined to him would prove chimerical." Ruskin wrote to the public 
press on the subject, and his letter was translated into Italian. In answer 
to further inquiries, he unfolded his ideas more fully. "The simplest 
and surest beginning," he said, "would be the purchase, either by the 
government or by a small company formed in Rome, of a few plots of 
highland in the Apennines, now barren for want of water, and valueless; 
and the showing what could be made of them by terraced irrigation such 
as English ofiicers have already introduced in many parts of India. The 
Agricultural College at Cirencester ought, I think, to be able to send out 
two or three superintendents, who would direct rightly the first processes 
of cultivation, choosing for purchase good soil in good exposures. . . . 
And the entire mountain side may be made one garden of orange and vine 
and olive beneath; and a wide blossoming orchard above; and a green 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 271 

None of these experiments, however, not even this 
successful venture into the publishing business, had 
for Ruskin anything like the significance of St. 
George*s Guild, a scheme of social reform about which 
he thought and planned down to his last working 
years, and out of which he evoked some of his most 
glowing visions of a better order. It was to be his last 
stand against the advancing tide of modern life, a 
final effort to slay the dragon of nineteenth-century 
industrialism. To his eyes the evil forces of modern 
civilization — everywhere assembled in strength — 
were sweeping onward, while the good forces were 
withdrawing from the turmoil and the foulness, 
eager to seek shelter in quiet retreats scattered over 
the land. With small beginnings but with clear 
purposes, Ruskin hoped to show how the sound 
elements of society might unite in a crusade against 
the common enemy. More particularly he wished to 
draw people away from the corruption and congestion 
of modern cities to the free, healthy life of the coun- 
try. He had hoped, he said, that by 1 871 the " earnest 
adjuration of Carlyle" in Past and Present^ and his 
own analysis of "the economical laws on which the 
real prosperity of a nation depends,'* to which he had 
given his best thought between i860 and 1870, would 
draw attention to what might be done by landlords 
who should devote their interests to the welfare of 

highest pasture for cattle, and flowers for bees — up to the edge of the 
snows of spring." {Works^ XVII, 549, 552.) Ruskin always thus became 
quickly enthusiastic over his latest scheme. "If I had followed the true 
bent of my mind," he once said to a friend, " I should have been a civil 
engineer. I should have found more pleasure in planning bridges and sea 
breakwaters than in praising modern painters." (XXXVII, 699.) 



272 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

the peasantry as a primary and not as a secondary 
object. Disappointed in this expectation, he now 
determined to invite any who had yet stout hearts to 
draw together and initiate a true and wholesome way 
of Hfe, in defiance of the world. He resolved to see 
what might be done by a company of persons pledged 
to devote a portion of their income to " the purchase 
of land in healthy districts, and the employment of 
laborers on that land, under the carefullest supervi- 
sion, and with every proper means of mental instruc- 
tion." Ruskin stated his purposes more fully in the 
following words: "This Guild was originally founded 
with the intention of showing how much food-pro- 
ducing land might be recovered by well-applied labor 
from the barren or neglected districts of nominally 
cultivated countries. With this primary aim, two 
ultimate objects of wider aim were connected: the 
leading one, to show what tone and degree of refined 
education could be given to persons maintaining 
themselves by agricultural labor; and the last, to 
convince some portion of the upper classes of society 
that such occupation was more honorable, and con- 
sistent with higher thoughts and nobler pleasures, 
than their at present favorite profession of war; and 
that the course of social movements must ultimately 
compel many to adopt it; — if willingly, then hap- 
pily, both for themselves and their dependents, — 
if resistingly, through much distress, and disturbance 
of all healthy relations between the master and paid 
laborer." ^ The St. George's Guild was thus an effort 
ta demonstrate on a small scale what could be done 

1 Works, XXX, 17, 45. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 273 

in rational organization of country life. It was an 
effort also, Ruskin confessed, to draw the peasantry 
away from socialism and to reduce to practice 
"Carlyle*s nobler exhortation in Past and Present.'' 
Should fortune deign to smile upon humble begin- 
nings, no man could predict what beneficent revolu- 
tions might be effected in the lives of English men 
and women! 

On December 23, 1871, Ruskin set aside £7,000, or 
a tenth of his fortune, as the St. George's Fund, and 
he called for volunteers to join him in giving a tenth 
of their incomes or whatever they could afford for 
general charity. They were to be organized into 
a company for the purchase of land. They were to be 
under the control of a master, elected by a majority 
of the members and liable to instant deposal, but 
while in office exercising autocratic power. Trustees 
were appointed to take charge of the funds. Rus- 
kin's appeal, however, met with little or no response. 
After many months of waiting, he wrote in Fors (May, 
1872): "Not one human creature, except a personal 
friend or two, for mere love of me, has answered." 
Only £236, 13s. came in at the end of three years. 
It was not until October, 1878, after endless trouble 
with the law, that a license was at last granted to the 
Guild to hold lands. 

The immediate practical plan of the organization 
was the establishment of agricultural communities. 
Land was to be bought (or given) for cultivation, 
"with humble and simple cottage dwellings under 
faultless sanitary regulation." Existing timber was 
to be preserved and streams kept unpolluted. Ten- 



274 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ants were to be under overseers, appointed by the 
trustees. They were to occupy the land under long 
lease, at a fixed rent, with the privilege of purchasing 
their holding if they could save the price of it. Mean- 
time the rents were to be lowered in proportion to 
every improvement by the tenant; and all money 
accumulated by the Guild was to be put back into 
the land that most needed it. The size of the allot- 
ment of land to each family was in some undefined 
way to be proportional to the family's reasonable 
needs, — it always being understood that no man 
should have more than he could cultivate with his 
own and his children's efforts. There were to be no 
machines moved by steam-power. All work was to be 
done by hand, or with the help of wind and water, 
and perhaps electricity. Everything that the farmers 
could make for themselves they were to make. They 
might build their cottages to their own minds, ex- 
cept "under certain conditions as to materials and 
strength." ^ There was to be as little trade or impor- 
tation of goods from outside as possible. The middle- 
man must go. Goods, or imported foods, were to be 
sold at fixed prices, and according to a fixed standard 
of quality, by salaried tradesmen, whose books "must 
always be open on the Master's order, and not only 

1 Works, XXVIII, 20. As to the tenants' making everything for 
themselves, Ruskin replied to a woman who objected to working at the 
loom while raising children that "if on those terms I find sufficient 
clothing cannot be provided, I will use factories for them, — only moved 
by water, not steam." The members of St. George were not asked to 
abjure machinery or travel on railroads, but "they should never do with 
a machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms 
are idle. " {Ibid., 248.) Ruskin also consented to the use of the sewing- 
machine, though he preferred hand-work. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 275 

(their) business position entirely known but (their) 
profits known to the public: the prices of all articles 
of general manufacture being printed with the percen- 
tages to every person employed in their production or 
sale.'* 1 Complete publicity of all commercial trans- 
actions was to be the law, all accounts of the masters 
and overseers, for example, being open for inspection 
at any time. 

Not only the economic foundations, but the educa- 
tional also, were to be strictly Ruskinian. Schools 
and museums, "always small and instantly service- 
able," would be established in the villages. Children 
were to be taught "compulsorily'* on the basis of 
such principles as Ruskin had long advocated. Ten- 
ants should have libraries in their homes, paid for out 
of the general fund, and made up of books selected 
from an authorized list. Newspapers were prohibited. 
"What final relations," said Ruskin, "may take 
place between masters and servants, laborers and 
employers, old people and young, useful people and 
useless, in such a society, only experience can con- 
clude; nor is there any reason to anticipate the 
conclusion." Meantime all members of the land- 
owning company — the proprietors — must subscribe 
to the following eight articles of St. George's 
Creed: 

I. "I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, 

Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things 

and creatures visible and invisible. 

I trust in the kindness of His law, and the 

goodness of His work. 

^ Works, XXIX, 113. 



276 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

And I will strive to love Him, and keep 
His law, and see His work, while I live. 
II. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in 
the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of 
its mercy, and the joy of its love. 

And I will strive to love my neighbor as 
myself, and, even when I cannot, will act 
as if I did. 

III. I will labor, with such strength and oppor- 
tunity as God gives me, for my own daily 
bread; and all that my hand finds to do, I 
will do with my might. 

IV. I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, 
any human being for my gain or pleasure; 
nor hurt, or cause to be hurt, any human 
being for my gain or pleasure; nor rob, or 
cause to be robbed, any human being for 
my gain or pleasure. 

V. I will not kill nor hurt any living creature 
needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, 
but will strive to save and comfort all gentle 
life, and guard and perfect all natural 
beauty, upon the earth. 

VI. I will strive to raise my own body and soul 
daily into higher powers of duty and hap- 
piness; not in rivalship or contention with 
others, but for the help, delight, and honor 
of others, and for the joy and peace of my 
own life. 

VII. I will obey all the laws of my country faith- 
fully; and the orders of its monarch, and of 
all persons appointed to be in authority 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 277 

under its monarch, so far as such laws or 
commands are consistent with what I sup- 
pose to be the law of God; and when they 
are not, or seem in anywise to need change, 
I will oppose them loyally and deliberately, 
not with malicious, concealed, or disorderly 
violence. 
VIII. And with the same faithfulness, and under 
the limits of the same obedience, which I 
render to the laws of my country, and the 
commands of its rulers, I will obey the laws 
of the Society called St. George, into which 
I am this day received; and the orders of 
its masters, and of all persons appointed to 
be in authority under its masters, so long 
as I remain a Companion, called of St. 
George." ^ 
Such were the hopes and plans for a better society. 
"The actual realization," to quote Ruskin's biog- 
rapher, "was a Master who, when wanted to discuss 
legal deeds, was often drawing leaves of anagallis 
tenella; a society of Companions, few and uninfluen- 
tial; some cottages in Wales; twenty acres of partly 
cleared woodland in Worcestershire; a few bleak acres 
in Yorkshire; ^ and a single museum. The large 
schemes for the reclamation of waste land and the 
novel use on a great scale of tides and streams shrunk 
into some minute gardening experiments at Brant- 

1 Worksy XXVIII, 419. 

2 Cook is evidently in error here, since the "few bleak acres" can only 
mean a plot of thirteen acres at Totley, in Derbyshire. There was a 
"small plot" in Yorkshire, but (to quote Cook) only of "about three- 
quarters of an acre." 



278 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

wood." ^ The cottages in Wales, eight in number, 
were the first gift to St. George. They were situated 
on the high cliffs at Barmouth, overlooking Cardigan 
Bay. The owner, Mrs. Talbot, offered them to Rus- 
kin in 1874, and he accepted them "at once with very 
glad thanks. . . . No cottagers," he wrote, "shall 
be disturbed, but in quiet and slow ways assisted, as 
each may deserve or wish to better their own houses 
in sanitary and comfortable points. My principle is 
to work with the minutest possible touches, but with 
steady end in view, and by developing as I can the 
energy of the people I want to help." ^ Ruskin was 
as good as his word. He demanded punctual pay- 
ments of rents but never changed the rate, and he 
kept up the property out of funds from the Guild. 
As a result the tenants lived out their lives in content- 
ment, regarding their cottages as homes rather than 
as temporary dwellings. No doubt much of the 
success of the enterprise was due to the devoted and 
direct management of Mrs. Talbot, who was in charge 
as late as 1900, according to an account by Miss 
Blanche Atkinson. "Year by year, any little im- 
provement which can add to the comfort of the 
cottagers is carried out under her orders," says Miss 
Atkinson; "a larger window here, a new fireplace 
there, an extra room contrived, as the children begin 
to grow up. But the chief aim is to keep the cottages 
at the original low rentals, so that the. poor may be 
able to stay in their old homes; and nothing is done to 
change the entirely cottage character of the dwellings. 

1 Life of Ruskin, II, 335. 

2 Works, XXX, intro., XXIX. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 279 

Of course, no tenant would be accepted unless of 
good character; and the knowledge that rent must be 
paid punctually, that no real discomfort or inconven- 
ience will be overlooked — if it can be remedied — and 
that each one is personally known, cared for in sick- 
ness, and helped in any difficulty, is an immense 
incentive to good conduct." ^ The second gift to St. 
George was twenty acres of woodland in Worcester- 
shire, the donation of Mr. George Baker, a member 
of the Guild and at that time (i 876-1 877) mayor of 
Birmingham. "The ground is in copse-wood," said 
Ruskin, "but good for fruit trees; and shall be 
cleared and brought into bearing." A beginning was 
made. Ruskin even thought at one time of building 
a museum upon the property. But his plans came to 
nothing. "The Guild," says Cook (1907), "has 
recently built a good farm-cottage on the land, for 
the purpose of letting it as a fruit farm." Another 
experiment in land-holding by the Guild met with 
much the same fate. "A few of the Sheffield working- 
men," said Ruskin, "who admit the possibility of St. 
George's notions being just, have asked me to let 
them rent some ground from the Company, where- 
upon to spend what spare hours they have, of morn- 
ing or evening, in useful labor." He responded to 
this appeal by the purchase in 1 877 of thirteen acres 
of "waste" ground some six miles out of Sheffield, at 
Totley, in Derbyshire. He knew little of the plans of 
these Sheffield workers, some of whorri were shoe- 
makers; but he determined not to interfere, at least 
until he saw developments. St. George would 

^ Ruskin s Social Experiment at Barmouthy 24. 



28o CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

require of them the observance only of "bare first 
principles — good work, and no moving of machinery 
by fire." Details of what happened are wanting, but 
the scheme appears to have fallen through very early 
as a result of disagreements or misunderstandings. 
"The proposed allotments," says Cook, who should 
know, if anyone, "had a short and, I believe, some- 
what stormy career, and Ruskin fell back upon a 
favorite resource on occasions of this kind; that is to 
say, he called his old gardener, David Downs, to the 
rescue." Ruskin hoped that the land might be made 
available for raising fruit trees, and for the cultiva- 
tion, under glass, of rare European plants. But the 
climate was inhospitable, and so finally the ground 
was "brought unto heart" to furnish strawberries, 
currants, and gooseberries to the Sheffield markets 
"at a price both moderate and fixed." The master 
soon lost interest in these waste Derbyshire acres, 
however, and they were subsequently let to a 
tenant.^ 

Although these agricultural schemes were of all his 
experiments in social reconstruction nearest the 
Master's heart, he found that he could not escape 
failure, unsupported and alone. He confessed his 
incapacity to manage the intricate affairs of business, 

1 Ruskin purchased a small parcel of land ("two acres and a few odd 
yards," he said; "about three-quarters of an acre," said Cook) at Clough- 
ton, near Scarborough, for the use of a member of the Guild, Mr. John 
Guy. Ruskin looked to this " brave and gentle companion " to show what 
could be done in "practical and patient country economy." But Mr. 
Guy withdrew after five years' stay, and the property was rented to 
another tenant, who was occupying it in 1907. "Of other property," 
says Cook, "the Guild holds some investments, now (1907) bringing in 
about £75 per annum." 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 281 

just as he was in the "midst of the twelfth century 
divinity of the mosaics of St. Mark's," or some other 
equally rapturous investigation in the field of art or 
nature; and he could find no one to assume leadership 
in his place. But his own special aptitudes found at 
last a proper expression in the museum of St. George 
at Sheffield, an enterprise in the best sense successful. 
One of Ruskin's former students at the Working 
Men*s College, Mr. Henry Swan, had invited him to 
meet a company of workmen at Walkley, a mile or so 
from Sheffield. As a result of this visit, he decided in 
1 875 to establish there the first museum of St. George, 
and to appoint Mr. Swan as curator. The site 
selected was the top of a hill "in the midst of green 
fields," commanding an extensive view over the 
surrounding country, including the valley of the Don 
and the woods of Wharncliffe Crags. The building 
was a small stone cottage, which had to accommodate 
both the specimens and the curator. To this modest 
shrine of the muses lovers of beauty came in numbers 
and from distant lands for many years. Finally the 
collection became too large for the Walkley cottage, 
and a new location had to be found. For some years 
Ruskin cherished the hope of building a marble 
museum, according to his own ideas, on the St. 
George land in Worcestershire, but the dream had to 
remain unrealized for lack of funds. In 1889 he 
accepted the offer of the Sheffield Corporation of an 
estate of forty acres known as Meersbrook Park, 
where the museum might find a permanent home. 
The Corporation agreed to furnish the land, the 
house, and the maintenance, while the Guild loaned 



282 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

its treasures for a period of years, which would no 
doubt be extended indefinitely. 

Upon this foundation the Ruskin Museum, as it 
came to be called, has had a notable record, both as a 
center for visitors and for students. It became at 
once the concrete expression for Ruskin of what art 
might do for the people. It was conceived as a local 
Museum, intended especially for the "laboring 
multitude," who, in times to come "when none but 
useful work is done and when all classes are com- 
pelled to share in it," will devote their leisure hours no 
more to the alehouse, but "to the contemplation and 
study of the works of God, and the learning that 
complete code of natural history which, beginning 
with the life and death of the Hyssop on the wall, 
rises to the knowledge of the life and death of the 
recorded generations of mankind, and of the visible 
starry Dynasties of Heaven." ^ It was thus a place 
for re-creative study, not for idle amusement. And it 
embodied Ruskin's ideal of what such a place should 
be, — small, accessible, containing "nothing crowded, 
nothing unnecessary, nothing puzzling," but only 
what was good and beautiful of its kind and that 
fully explained. With characteristic energy and en- 
thusiasm, the Master of St. George devoted much 
time, down to the end of his working days, collecting 
and arranging materials for the museum. Illuminated 
manuscripts, minerals, precious stones, coins, casts, 
drawings he gave liberally from his own treasures or 
purchased with funds of the Guild. He engaged a 
company of young artists to make photographs or 
1 Works, XXVIII, 451. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 283 

copies of French and Italian art before the ravages of 
time or the hand of the restorer had done their irrep- 
arable damage. Not until his shattered health 
compelled him to put aside every task did he pause in 
his efforts to realize his ideal. "Every house of the 
Muses," he said, "is an Interpreter's by the wayside, 
or rather, a place of oracle and interpretation in one. 
And the right function of every museum, to simple 
persons, is the manifestation to them of what is lovely 
in the life of Nature, and heroic in the life of 
Man." 

With the museum the work of St. George culmi- 
nated but did not end. Its history would not be com- 
plete without at least a brief mention of two or three 
industrial experiments, all of them visible, though 
feeble, realizations of Ruskin's hopes of a new social 
order. He had said in Fors Clavigera that in St. 
George's Society the girls were to learn "to spin, 
weave, and sew, and at the proper age to cook all 
ordinary food exquisitely." He had expressed more 
than once the craftsman's interest in needlework and 
in all the art of creating fabrics; — "the true nature of 
thread and needle, the structure first of wool and 
cotton, of fur and hair and down, hemp, flax, and 
silk. . . . Thephaseof its dyeing. What azures and 
emeralds and Tyrian scarlets can be got into fibres of 
thread! Then the phase of its spinning. The mys- 
tery of that divine spiral, from finest to firmest, which 
renders lace possible at Valenciennes; — anchorage 
possible, after Trafalgar. Then the mystery of weav- 
ing. The eternal harmony of warp and woof; of all 
manner of knotting, knitting, and reticulation. . . . 



284 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

And, finally, the accomplished phase of needlework.*' * 
Undoubtedly Ruskin would have been happy could 
he have enlisted the co-operation of women over the 
countrysides in a revival of domestic arts, — women 
who should "secure the delivery on demand," he said, 
"for one price, over at least some one counter in 
the nearest country town, of entirely good fabric of 
linen, woollen, and silk; and consider that task, for the 
present, their first duty to Heaven and Earth. ... I 
believe myself that they will find the only way is the 
slow, but simple and sure one, of teaching any girls 
they have influence or authority over, to spin and 
weave; and appointing an honest and religious 
woman for their merchant." ^ 

Through the co-operation of two companions of St. 
George he found opportunity to carry out this 
interest in the domestic crafts. In 1876 Mr. Rydings 
of Laxey, Isle of Man, wrote to Ruskin that wool- 
spinning was still a healthy industry among the 
women there, although remuneration was so small 
that the aged and infirm were frequently obliged to 
leave their spinning-wheels for work in the mills. 
Ruskin's sympathy was at once aroused and, with 
the help of Mr. Rydings, he determined to revive 
spinning and weaving at Laxey. Accordingly a 
water mill was erected "for the manufacture of the 
honest thread into honest cloth — dyed indelibly." 
Farmers brought their wool to the mill and were paid 
in finished cloth or yarn for home knitting. Much 
cloth, besides, was made for the outside market. 
Ruskin never saw the mill. He loaned the Guild's 
^ Works, XXIX, sio. ^Ihid., XXIX, 118. 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 285 

money to Mr. Rydings for support of the industry, 
which he hoped to see continued as it began. In the 
course of time, however, it was found impossible to 
keep up the enterprise on the basis of hand-spinning 
and hand-weaving; and so it was given over to the 
manufacture of woollen cloths. The debt having 
now been paid, the Guild of St. George had no further 
connection with the business, and "Laxey homespun" 
became a thing of the past. 

Meantime, through the enthusiasm of another 
disciple and companion of St. George, Ruskin was to 
realize his "vision of thread and needlework." It 
came through the Langdale linen industry, revived by 
Mr. Albert Fleming among the cottagers of the West- 
moreland hills around Coniston. The romantic story 
is best told in Mr. Fleming's own words, written in 
1890: " Scattered about on the fell side were many old 
women, too blind to sew and too old for hand work, 
but able to sit by the fireside and spin, if any one 
would show them how, and buy their yarn. ... I 
got myself taught spinning, and then set to work to 
teach others. I tried my experiment here, in the 
Langdale Valley, in Westmoreland, half-way between 
Mr. Ruskin's home at Coniston and Wordsworth's 
at Rydal. Sixty years ago every cottage here had its 
wheel, and every larger village its weaver. . ." After 
much difficulty wheels were made, flax imported from 
Ireland, and a cottage school of spinning begun. . . . 
"When a woman could spin a good thread I let her 
take a wheel home, and gave her the flax, buying it 
back from her when spun, at the rate of 2s. 6d. per 
pound of thread. . . . Next came the weaving. In a 



286 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

cellar of Kendal we discovered a loom; it was in 
twenty pieces, and when we got it home not all the 
collective wisdom of the village knew how to set it up. 
Luckily we had a photograph of Giotto's Campanile, 
and by the help of that the various parts were rightly 
put together. We then secured an old weaver, and 
one bright Easter morning saw our first piece of linen 
woven — the first purely hand-spun and hand-woven 
linen produced in all broad England in our genera- 
tion. . . . The next process was to bleach it. . . . 
As Giotto fixed our loom for us, Homer taught us the 
true principle of bleaching. . . . Sun, air, and dew 
were our only chemicals." ^ Mr. Fleming found that 
people bought the product of his loom, and so the 
work prospered. " It has spread in many directions," 
said Cook in 1907, " and there are branches in London 
and in many parts of the country; but the original 
industry still flourishes" now at Coniston.^ 

So ends the story of the activities of St. George's 
Guild. It is generally said that nothing came of them, 
that they were the dreams of a medieval dreamer, 
"born out of due time," who longed to revive a thir- 

1 Works, XXX, 328-330. 

2 Ibid , XXX, intro.., XXXVII. Another industry that owed its re- 
organization to the inspiration of Ruskin was the woollen firm of George 
Thomson & Co. at Huddersfield. Mr. Thomson was a disciple of Ruskin, 
was one of the trustees of St. George, and in 191 1 was its Master, The 
new plan rested upon co-partnership. It provided " a sick pay and pen- 
sion fund"; and adopted the eight-hour day, with fixed wages for all. 
Half of the net profits went to the workers, half to the consumers. Grad- 
ually the workers were to buy the shares of the capital and own the con- 
cern. In 1886 Ruskin wrote to Mr. Thomson of the experiment as "the 
momentous and absolutely foundational step taken by you in all that is 
just and wise, in the estabhshment of these relations with your work- 
men." {Works, XXX, 333.) 



THE SWORD OF ST. GEORGE 287 

teenth-century society a little after the pattern of the 
fellowship of St. Francis; or, worse still, that they 
were the grotesque efforts of a modern Don Quixote, 
rushing madly at imaginary evils and making himself 
ridiculous before the world. Even Carlyle at first 
thought the whole thing a joke. ■ It is true that Rus- 
kin's fancy at times played fast and loose with the 
idea of a new society, with the result that his sober 
plans, as he confessed, were too much colored with 
romance. He thought of a system that should be 
fit "for wide European work," and under the name 
of Monte Rosa it was to "number its members 
ultimately by myriads." He wrote out a fantastic 
scheme of government, a kind of feudal hierarchy 
beginning with the master, as absolute lord, including 
various ranks of companions, and ending at the bot- 
tom of the scale with the tenant farmers and hired 
workers. And for this society, each class with its 
distinguishing costume, he was to devise a medieval 
Florentine coinage! But all this was rather the 
whimsical amusement of Ruskin than his serious 
purpose. Medievalist he was and a disciple of St. 
Francis, but he never seriously thought of setting up 
pure medievalism in the nineteenth century, as the 
actual experiments of St. George abundantly showed. 
He disclaimed any idea of founding a colony, or 
separate society, after a medieval or communistic 
pattern. There was nothing new in the laws of St. 
George, he protested, "not a single object which had 
not been aimed at by good men since the world 
began." Undoubtedly what he had most at heart in 
all his thinking about the Guild was a fellowship of 



288 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

workers sworn to live out the gospel of work as it had 
been preached by Carlyle and himself, and was even 
then being preached by William Morris. He wanted 
to see a company of people pledged to a certain indi- 
vidual and social conduct in the places where they 
already were; pledged to honesty; pledged to earn 
their living with their own hands and heads; and 
pledged to use their leisure in the cultivation of their 
souls. "You are to work," he said, " so far as circum- 
stances admit of your doing so, with your own hands 
in the production of substantial means of life — food, 
clothes, house, or fire. . . . What you have done in 
fishing, fowling, digging, sowing, watering, reaping, 
milling, shepherding, shearing, spinning, weaving, 
building, carpentering, slating, coal-carrying, cooking, 
coster-mongering, and the like, — that is St. George's 
work^ and means of power. . . . And the main 
message St. George brings to you is that you will not 
be degraded by this work nor saddened by it."^ 
Surely a dream of restoring honesty and health and 
happiness to our modern world of workers is not 
after all such a "frantic" dream! 

1 Works, XXIX, 472. 



CHAPTER VIII 
HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 

"There must be a new world, if there is to be any world 
at all. ... In the course of long strenuous centuries, 
I can see the State become what it is actually bound to 
be, the keystone of a most real 'Organization of Labor,' — 
and on this Earth a world of some veracity, and some 
heroism, once more worth living in!" — Carlyle. 

"Whatever our station in life may be, at this crisis, 
those of us who mean to fulfil our duty ought first to live on 
as little as we can; and, secondly, to do all the wholesome 
work for it we can, and to spend all we can spare in doing 
all the sure good we can. And sure good is, first in feeding 
people, then in dressing people, then in lodging people, and 
lastly in rightly pleasing people, with arts, or sciences, or 
any other subject of thought." — Ruskin. 

It is one of the glories of English literature that 
it has remained close to the life of the English 
people. Men of letters in every age of England's 
history have taken the substance of their art, as well 
as its inspiration, directly from the traditions, the 
struggles, the hopes and fears of the men and women 
who have made up its national life, whether on its 
political, economic, social, or religious side. Dilet- 
tanti and critics from time to time have found fault 
with a literary art that was (as they thought) every- 
thing but literary, that sometimes espoused ethics 
and eschewed aesthetics, and that often seemed to 
care at least as much for the welfare of society as for 
its entertainment. But the creators of art have 

289 



290 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

thought differently. Poets and prosemen alike, to a 
degree hardly paralleled in any other country of 
modern times, have been unable or unwilling to 
alienate their art from the social life about them; or 
where their more purely imaginative interests have 
conflicted with the duties of the hour they have been 
ready, like Milton, to give their pen to the services of 
the state, even though the voice of the muse should 
for the while be silenced. No age of English literature 
is more conspicuous in this respect than the Victorian, 
for the very good reason, no doubt, that in this age 
more than in any other, the problems of society 
became suddenly complex and urgent, threatening 
disturbances, both material and spiritual, of a kind 
undreamed of by generations that had gone before. 
Consequently the greater writers of this period, with 
few exceptions, turned their attention to the "condi- 
tion of England question,'' not with the purpose of 
exciting the curiosity of a sophisticated public with 
unusual, out-of-the-way matters, nor with the latter- 
day notion of exploiting a segment of society in the 
interest of imaginative literature. The great Victo- 
rians turned to the world around them, because, 
seeing that it was a world disturbed to its center by 
new and ominous social phenomena, they saw also 
that unless something were done to awaken the public 
heart and mind to a sense of the vast evils and the 
vast injustice in the changed industrial order, nothing 
might save England from a catastrophic disaster 
such as an earlier generation had witnessed across the 
Channel. And so literature became a handmaid of 
reform. The social ideals of a great epoch were 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 291 

touched, and, to a degree beyond any man's comput- 
ing, were transformed by the magic of art. Let any 
one who doubts the truth of this assertion, contrast 
the public conscience of England during the last 
twenty years of the nineteenth century with the 
public conscience during the period stretching for 
fifty years back of 1880; and then let him consider 
the content as well as the immense vogue and force 
of English letters during the same period, and he will 
be a dull inquirer if he be not convinced that for the 
"higher standards of social justice which the people of 
the later decades possessed over those of the earlier 
period they owed a large debt to the Victorian writers 
who had already passed from the stage, or whose 
work was practically done. The novels of Dickens, 
Thackeray, and George Eliot, of Mrs. Gaskell, 
Disraeli, Kingsley, and Charles Reade, the poetry of 
Tennyson, the essays of Arnold, each and all in their 
various ways, told powerfully in the direction of fuller 
knowledge of social abuses or problems, and of more 
humane ideals in the work of suppression or solution. 
Of all the forces in Victorian letters that affected the 
great currents of industrial and social life, however, 
the writings of Carlyle and Ruskin were probably the 
most potent in their own time and most influential 
upon leaders who came after them. 

Their challenge and their program have been 
reviewed in detail in the preceding chapters, with 
some reference to the circumstances out of which 
their message arose. It will be necessary in con- 
clusion to sketch the broader outlines only of their 
work, for the sake of comparison and contrast, and as 



292 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

a background against which to set down some aspects 
of their influence upon their time and ours. The | 
comparisons are more numerous, if not more striking, 
than the contrasts. It is not to be forgotten in this 
connection that Ruskin, when referring to his social 
philosophy, always regarded himself as the pupil and 
disciple of Carlyle. He spoke the truth when in 1880 
he wrote to a correspondent of himself and his master 
as follows: "We feel so much alike, that you may 
often mistake one for the other now." Their attacks 
upon their time were indeed in many essentials 
identical. Both looked upon the era in which they 
lived as one of transition from an older settled ' 
feudalistic order to one whose ultimate form no man 
could predict, but which all the signs of the times 
seemed to declare was likely to be in some sense 
democratic. To Carlyle and Ruskin, looking out 
upon a world in which the masses were almost to a 
man unenlightened, democracy was synonymous with / 
anarchy and must be put down; for so they inter- 
preted the popular movements around them in the 
light of the revolutions of 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871. 
But the threatened upheaval of roaring Demos from 
below nevertheless meant that something was rotten 
in the state of affairs and that steps must be taken, 
and taken quickly, to remove the cause of disease in 
the body politic. And so they attacked the extrava- 
gance, the indifference, the cupidity of the rich, — the 
Mammon worshipers and all their breed, who 
clothed themselves in purple and fine linen and doffed 
the world aside. They attacked the notion that \ 
human labor was a commodity and that workmen \ 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 293 

were only so many "hands." They held up before 
their contemporaries the misery and^ ignorance of the 
poor, and all the evils of an industrial system erected 
upon the foundations of laissez-faire. Radical and 
conservative in mingled strains, at once communistic 
and Tory, in economics reddest of the red, in politics 
often more reactionary than the House of Lords, 
they yet broke into the smug and detached circles of 
Victorian society as with the force of thunderbolts, 
clearing the air for wiser thinking and healthier 
living. ^ 

And into this clearer atmosphere they projected 
proposals of reform in most cases alike in principle 
and, underneath all the impetuous force of the chal- 
lenge, supported by a spirit essentially and typically 
British in its conservatism; for they knew that , 
thoroughgoing social reconstruction could be effected, 
if at all, only gradually, a little to-day, a lit^e to- 
morrow, and yet more in the years to come. ^ Carlyle 
would have entirely agreed with Ruskin, who said 
that "all useful change must be slow and by progres- 
sive and visibly secure stages. The evils of centuries 
cannot be defied and conquered in a day."'^ All the 
more were they conservative, because they believed 
that reform to be effectual must reach down to men 
and not be content with legislative adjustments. 
And so we hear, from Sartor Resartus to Fors Clavi- 
geray a reiterated declaration of the rights and digni- 
ties and possibilities of the soul of man irrespective of 
station in life, better than all machinery, bigger than 
all theories, richer than all the wealth of the British 

1 Worksy XXIX, 548. 



294 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

Isles. The whole message of Carlyle and Ruskin was 
in effect a challenge, — a challenge to the leaders of 
their time to realize that infinitely the most impor- 
tant element in industry was the human factor, and 
that what the worker wanted more than all else was 
justice and freedom, the indefeasible rights of his 
spiritual nature. This was first and fundamental, but 
always with the implication of an unchanging status 
in the workers as a class. What the workers needed 
next was guidance rather than political power. In a 
time when the world was "becoming dismantled" 
and when the destinies were spinning new "organic 
filaments," Carlyle and Ruskin looked to an aris- 
tocracy for leadership, an aristocracy of talents to be 
regenerated under pressure of the immense responsi- 
bilities of the new era. They looked to the aristoi 
to express through the state, — that is to say, through 
constitutional government, — a control over social 
forces far more complete than most people then 
dreamed of, and to be exercised in accordance with 
the findings of a wide investigation as to the condi- 
tions and needs of the people. A wise and just cen- 
tralized authority would accomplish many things. 
It would throw out the policy of laissez-faire^ root 
and branch. It would organize labor, gradually 
admitting it to some form of partnership with indus- 
try. It would extend education to the masses. And 
in this guidance of labor to a better organization both 
Carlyle and Ruskin believed that leaders would find 
suggestions and inspiration from medieval times; for 
in those days there were association and freedom in 
work, and the various classes in the social order were 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 295 

held together not by cash-nexus alone, but by ties of 
/human fellowship. 

Their combined program of reform was thus social- 
istic rather than socialist. Its worth and power are 
obvious, and of these qualities we shall say more 
presently. But its weakness is no less obvious. It 
was at once too individualistic and, especially in the 
case of Ruskin, too paternalistic. Both Carlyle and 
Ruskin regarded the masses too much as individual 
units when it came to moral reform, and they re- 
garded the leaders too much as an independent con- 
trolling class when it came to political reform. This 
is a criticism which suggests the whole force of 
Mazzini's vigorous attack upon Carlyle (an attack 
that might with equal justice have been made upon 
Ruskin), to the effect that Carlyle wholly overlooked 
the true conception of modern democracy as a move- 
ment in which "the collective thought was seeking to 
supplant the individual thought in the social organ- 
ism." ^ To Carlyle as to Ruskin the sins of society 
were fundamentally the sins of individual men and 
women far more than they were the evil fruits of a 
vicious system. And on the political side, they could 
not see, as did John Stuart Mill, that political free- 
dom might educate the masses for increased respon- 
sibility and that the cure for democracy might be 
I more democracy. 

It is easier from the vantage point of our time, 
however, to find fault with the ultra-aristocratic 

1 The Writings of Thomas Carlyle, in Mazzini's Essay Sy 21. Cf. "Mr. 
Carlyle comprehends only the individual; the true sense of the unity of 
the human race escapes him. He sympathizes with all men, but it is with 
the separate life of each, and not with their collective life." {ibid.t 124.) 



296 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

politics of these great Victorians than it would have 
been in theirs, sixty and seventy years ago, when 
individualism was still a rampant creed, and when 
any form of collectivism as a political force was 
practically unheard of. Carlyle and Ruskin were by 
no means alone in their fear of what might happen if 
political power should suddenly be transferred to the 
masses. Elections were notoriously corrupt. Bri- 
bery was open and unabashed. The populace was 
densely ignorant, and was ever and anon boiling with 
discontent and threatening to explode. Irresponsible 
crowds, many of them hardly more than hoodlums, 
were likely to be set off by popular firebrands like 
the Chartist, Feargus O'Connor, who talked wildly 
about "physical force without cease," and who in a 
speech at Manchester in 1838 said: "If peace giveth 
not law, I am for war to the knife." ^ General Sir 
Charles Napier, who saw the starved and desperate 
poor in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire in 
1839, declared that it looked to him as if "the falling 
of an Empire were beginning. "2 Popular uprisings in 
Europe in 1848 were put down only by strong mili- 
tary power, sometimes with terrible cost of life, as in 
the street fighting in Paris, June 23-26. Events were 
so portentous in those years that even so rationalistic 
an observer as John Stuart Mill, reflecting upon the 
questions which the progress of democracy was 
pressing forward, remarked in a letter (1852) to a 
friend: "It is to be decided whether Europe shall 

1 Carlyle once told Lecky, the historian, that two great curses seemed to 
him to be eating away the heart and worth of the English people, — drink 
and "stump oratory." (Lecky, Historical and Political Essays^ II2.) 

2Hovell, The Chartist Movement^ 136. 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 297 

enter peacefully and prosperously into a better order 
of things, or whether the new ideas will be inaugu- 
rated by a century of war and violence like that which 
followed the Reformation of Luther/' ^ Was it safe to 
place the ballot into the hands of ignorant and pro- 
pertyless men, capable of mob violence ? Macaulay, 
Lord John Russell, and Sir Robert Peel did not think 
so, for in the debate in the House of Commons on the 
famous Chartist petition of 1842, they led in an 
attack upon universal manhood suffrage and carried 
the day by an overwhelming vote. Opposition of 
course subsided with the years, but it was very much 
alive even after the Reform Act of 1867, as is shown 
in the political writings of Herbert Spencer, Maine, 
Fitzjames Stephen, and Bagehot.^ No man was 
more liberal in his political thought than Mill and yet 
to the end of his days Mill feared the ignorance and 
inferiority of the working classes; and to check their 

1 Letters of John Stuart Mill, I, 170. Cf. Rose, The Rise of Democracy, 
Ch. IX. e. g. — "When Louis Philippe, King of the French, escaped out of 
Paris in a cab; when Metternich, after controUing the destines of Central 
and Southern Europe, was fain to flee from Vienna in a washerwoman's 
cart; when Italian Dukes and German translucencies hastily granted 
democratic constitutions, to petition for which had recently been a sure 
passport to the dungeon, could not a monster demonstration of the men 
of London force the Charter on a trembling and penitent Parliament?" 
(137). Cf. also, Mazzini, Europe: Its Condition (1862), e. g. — "For sixty 
years Europe has been convulsed by a series of political struggles which 
have assumed all aspects by turns; which have raised every conceivable 
flag, from that of pure despotism, to that of anarchy; from the organiza- 
tion of the bourgeoise in France and elsewhere as the dominant caste, to 
the jacqueries of the peasants of Gallicia. Thirty revolutions have taken 
place. Two or three royal dynasties have been engulfed in the abyss of 
popular fury," etc. {Essays, 265.) 

2 In his introduction to the second edition (1872) to his English Consti- 
tution (1867), Bagehot shows throughout a fear of political power in the 
hands of workingmen. He feared subservience to them on the part of 
poHticians, and he feared combinations among themselves as a class 



298 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

power he favored plurality of votes for the better 
qualified citizens, the kind of thing (at least in prin- 
ciple) which Ruskin endorsed and which there is no 
reason to suppose Carlyle also would not have 
supported could he have once seen its effective 
establishment.^ It should be understood, moreover, 
in a consideration of the suffrage situation in those 
days, that among the ultra-radical thinkers there was 
still a good deal of equalitarian philosophy in the air, 
a philosophy that went back to Bentham and Adam 
Smith and beyond them to the French Revolution 
and Rousseau, saying that men were by nature equal 
in capacity and different only because their environ- 
ment had differed. To Carlyle and Ruskin such 
thinking gave the lie to the plainest facts of life, and 
was full of peril to the state. Something of the fierce 
scorn which they at times let loose upon prison re- 
formers and sentimental prophets of humanitarian- 
ism must therefore be attributed to their fear of the 
spread of this dangerous heresy concerning equality. ^ 

against the other classes, — "an evil," he says, "of the first magnitude. 
... I am exceedingly afraid of the ignorant multitudes of the new 
constituencies." 

1 See Ruskin's proposed second letter (1852) to the Times on election, 
Worksy XII, 600. The letters were suppressed by Ruskin's father. 

2 The severest criticism that can be directed against the political thought 
of Carlyle and Ruskin is not that they would have thrown out the ballot, 
for they would not; nor that they believed in despotism rather than in 
constitutional government (a travesty of their creed). It is that they had 
no faith that the responsibility of the ballot (with education) would raise 
the standard of life among the masses. They would first raise the stand- 
ard of life and then bestow the ballot. The paradox remains, therefore, 
that the prophets who habitually championed the cause of the workers 
and who eloquently preached the gospel of the worth of the individual 
souU always distrusted the capacity of the masses for political power. 
They did not believe that their contentment depended upon their voting. 

Admitting the paradox, the critics of Carlyle (for he has been more 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 299 

Enough has been said, however, to indicate their 
position among their contemporaries on a great 
political question of the day, and it is tirneJO-tum 
from comparisons to certain striking ^contrasts. 
Ruskin came to the study of industry an3*society 
from art, and from art he brought with him a gospel 
of work, not more powerful nor more sane than 
Carlyle's, but richer and with more promise in it for 
the future. Both stood for self-expression in work, 
but for Carlyle it was the expression of duty, of grim 
fidelity to a task, a task generally unpleasant but 
needing to be done, and done without whimpering. 
Carlyle felt that toil kept men out of sin, and that 
toil, manfully accomplished, added immensely to the 
nobility of a man's nature. Ruskin believed all this 
as an antidote to laziness or dissipation and as a way 
of getting the rough work of the world done. But he 
went further, at least for wise men in a wisely ordered 
society. He preached the gospel of joy in creative/ 
effort. He taught that it was right work only that 
made men happy. In art, the symbol of man's 
highest felicity in self-expression, he read the signifi- 
cance of work on a wider scale. A man must find in 
his appointed task something more than an expres- 
sion of duty; he must find in it an outlet for his 

assailed on this point than Ruskin) are not justified in saying that he 
provides no machinery for the discovery of his hero-governor. It is true 
that he disclaims any responsibility for inventing machinery, and that he 
is vague and general as to methods of political reform; but he everywhere 
assumes that the estabUshed ways (ballot, public meetings, representative 
assemblies) will be used by those who have the capacity to use them. The / 
able men will be placed in power, and kept there, by those who can recog- 
nize ability when they see it, be they toilworn craftsmen or titled aristo- 
crats. 



300 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

creative capacities, his loyalties to society, his crav- 
ings for fellowship, and even for his spirit of play. 
And along with this newer gospel of work Ruskin 
brought from art his hatred of the ugliness in modern 
life. Hence he preached far more than did Carlyle 
(who in fact only touched on the subject here and 

V there) against the dirt and noise that industrialism 
had brought in its train. Accordingly, one of his 
favorite remedies for social regeneration was increased 
beauty in our daily life, in our cities, and in our 
homes. 

\ For the reason that he came to industry by the 
pathway of art, Ruskin had a truer appreciation than 
Carlyle of the grinding slavery of machine labor. 
Mechanism for Carlyle was, as we have seen, a broad 
term to cover all the manifestations of materialism in 
the nineteenth century, and as such he laid upon it 
titanian blows, such as the hands of Ruskin could not 
deliver. Mechanism for Ruskin meant division of 
labor and a worse than serfdom, in the factory sys- 
tem. It meant the negation of his whole gospel of 
joy in work. Consequently his attack upon it, while 
less powerful and dramatic than Carlyle's, was far 
more reasoned and carried with it far more hope for 
the future. Ruskin's entire social program, in fact, 
although nowhere supported by so impressive a 
personality as Carlyle*s, was far more detailed and 
went much further in the right directions. Carlyle 
never pretended to write political economy and he 
suggested specific economic remedies hesitatingly. 
Ruskin marched straight into the camp of the enemy, 
striking about him, to the right and to the left, and 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 301 

sometimes making a sad spectacle of himself. But ; 
he did good service, — most of all, probably, in social- 
izing economics; for he showed that man cannot be 
economically considered without being educationally, 
ethically, and even religiously considered also. He 
developed, indeed, much further than did Carlyle 
the idea of a man*s work in the world as a social 
service, and he understood better than his master the 
possibility of a changed attitude in the social con- 
sciousness towards servile labor, towards the trades 
and business generally, and towards the pecuniary 
reward for work. 

^ If now in conclusion we turn to a brief considera- 
tion of the influence of this social philosophy of Car- 
lyle and Ruskin, we shall find reason to believe that 
it told powerfully upon a wide circle of intellectual 
and social leaders during the years from 1835 to 1880. 
This was a period in English life of unrest, criticism, 
and transition. As Arthur Hugh Clough wrote in 
1848, there seemed to be 

" Only infinite jumble and mess and dislocation." 

To most people, particularly to the working classes, 
as to Dickens's Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times 
(1854), the industrial world was ''a' a muddle." Even 
at the end of the period, Matthew Arnold, most 
discerning and dispassionate of observers, declared 
in his essay Equality (1878): "We are trying to live 
on with a social organization of which the day is 
over." The government during this time had no far- 
reaching policy of social reform. Parliament, under 
the influence of liberal-utilitarian policies, was a good 



302 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

deal less actively engaged in creating new agencies 
of control than in removing old disabilities against 
Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters, and old restrictions, 
such as the Corn Laws, the Navigation Laws, and 
the various import duties that were hampering 
freedom of trade. ^ It was the formative period for 
organized labor, marked up and down by many acute 
industrial disturbances, which served, however, to 
warn the public of the growing strength of trade 
unionism. 2 Employers, almost to a man, were still 
militantly individualistic, declaring that the admin- 
istration of industry belonged to them and that they 
would deal with the workers only as individuals.^ 
Karl Marx was not much felt as a force in the English 
world of labor before 1880. The Fabians had not yet 
organized, and Henry George's Progress and Poverty^ 
a book of tremendous significance, was not published 
until 1879. ^^ ^^^ intellectual circles of that time 
two groups were conspicuous above all others, the 
utilitarians and the men of the Oxford movement. 



1 There was of course always a certain political current in favor of state 
interference, stronger towards the end of the period than at the beginning. 
Factory Acts were passed from time to time to regulate hours of labor or 
conditions; and in 1870 the great Education Act was passed and amended 
in 1876, making elementary education compulsory. It is interesting to 
find that Carlyle was one of the earliest advocates of state control. At a 
time when there was wide-spread opposition to the Poor Law Amendment 
Act of 1834, which first established a central control of poor relief, Carlyle 
(in Chartism) welcomed the law: "supervised by the central government, 
in what spirit soever executed, is supervisal from a centre." 

2 In 1868 occurred the first meeting of the Trade-Union Congress. In 
1871 the Trade Unions Act recognized the legality of unions; and in 1875 
the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (passed in 1871, virtually 
making unionism illegal) fully established collective bargaining as legal. 
The Independent Labor Party was not formed until 1892. 

^ C/". Webb, History of Trade Unionism, 250. 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 303 

One, chiefly commercial, held up the glories of Eng- 
lish industry and trade, and preached material 
progress; the other, chiefly clerical, glorified the 
Church as the savior of society: and neither group 
voiced the great social stirrings of the people. Even 
John Stuart Mill, in some respects the most humane 
and most prophetic intellect of his time, and the high 
priest of the Liberals, never entirely shook off the 
effects of his earlier and narrower utilitarianism. 
''Laissez-faire,'' he said in his Principles of Political 
Economy, "should be the general practice: every 
departure from it, unless required by some great 
good, is a certain evil.*' ^ Economics, in utilitarian 
circles at least, was not yet socialized, and if social 
problems were discussed at all the discussion was 
generally carried on. in the high and dry atmosphere 
of Ricardian principles — rent, value, consumption, 
production, profits, losses, — an atmosphere far re- 
moved from the dust and din of the toiling masses 
who had come into existence in the wake of the 
industrial revolution. 

Into this atmosphere Carlyle and Ruskin came as 
with the effect of an electric storm, bringing men once 
more face to face with the elemental forces of life and 
arousing within them the hope of a better day. From 
1835, for twenty-five years, Carlyle (to consider him 
first) was the dominant literary personality of Eng- 
land. Coming into his presence, out of the academic 
or social life of early Victorian times was, as Lady 
Ashburton remarked, "like returning from some con- 
ventional world to the human race." His books, his 

^ Principles^ 950: Ashley's Edition of 1909. 



304 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

lectures, his home, were the sources and center of 
an extraordinary personal force that fell powerfully 
upon many intellectual and spiritual leaders of that 
day, old and young, but chiefly young. The voice of 
Carlyle to the generations of college men in 1840- 
1850 was no doubt mainly a voice to awaken and 
thrill, but it carried tidings of the oppressed poor and 
a very definite report that all was not well in the great 
outside world of industry. Sartor Resartus^ the Es- 
says^ Fast and Present, were indeed a new charter 
of freedom to the men of the English and Scottish 
universities. But they were more; for they pro- 
claimed the spirit of democracy even while they 
condemned the method of democracy. As Professor 
MacCunn says: "It would be nearer the truth to 
affirm that though all the political predictions which 
Carlyle ever penned were falsified, though he were 
proved wrong in his forecasts and Mill and Mazzini 
right, he would still remain one of the great political 
writers of the century. . . . For the root and the 
fruit of democracy — what are they but the recogni- 
tion of the worth, dignity and possibilities of the 
individual life, however flickering and obscure? 
Carlyle joins hands with Mill and Mazzini here. He 
outdoes them. No writer in our literature, it is safe to 
say, has done more for this, the essence of the demo- 
cratic spirit, than this sworn foe of political democ- 
racy." ^ It is difficult to believe that readers of Car- 

^ MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers^ 163-4. Mazzini, too, recognized 
(1843) the democratic spirit of Carlyle: "Amidst the noise of ma- 
chinery, wheels, and steam-engines, he has been able to distinguish 
the stifled plaint of the prisoned spirit, the sigh of millions." {Essays, 
IIS.) 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 305 

lyle could have escaped these social implications in 
his thought. Emerson recognized them fully in his 
review of Past and Present in the 'Dial. "It is a 
political tract/* he said, "and since Burke, since 
Milton, we have had nothing to compare with it. . . . 
The book of a powerful and accomplished thinker, 
who has looked with naked eyes at the dreadful polit- 
ical signs in England for the last few years." ^ Lecky, ''\ 
the historian, who was far from being a Carlylean, 
considered Carlyle's social influence upon his genera- 
tion to have been very great, particularly in his resist- 
ance to laissez-faire^ in his support of the cause of 
increased government regulation, and in his cham- 
pionship of education, emigration, and better rela- 
tions between masters and men. "It will be found,*' ''^ 
said Lecky, "that although he may not have been 
wiser than those who advocated the other side, yet 
his words contained exactly that kind of truth which 
was most needed or most generally forgotten, and his 
reputation will steadily rise." ^ The testimony of "'" 
Edward Caird, successor to Jowett as Master of 
Balliol, is to much the same effect. Caird was a 
student at the University of Glasgow in 1 850-1 856, 
and at Oxford in 1 860-1 863. Carlyle, he says "was 
the greatest literary influence of my student days. . . 
And undoubtedly, at that time, Carlyle was the au- 
thor who exercised the most powerful charm upon 
young men who were beginning to think. . . . Nor 
was he merely a student who cast new light on the 
past; he was inspired with a passion for social reform, 

1 Emerson, Works y Centenary Edition, XII, 379. 

2 Carlyle' s Message to his Age (1891), in Historial Essay Sy 106. 



3o6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

which at least in this country,^ was then felt by few. 
He expressed, almost for the first time in English, 
that disgust at the mean achievements of what we 
call civilization, that generous wrath at the arbitrary 
limitation of its advantages, that deep craving for a 
better order of social life, which is the source of so 
many of the most important social and political 
movements of the present day." ^ It is needless to 
accumulate testimony where the evidence is so pre- 
ponderatingly in the same scale, but one further 
statement may perhaps be allowed, since it comes 
from a critic who in his thinking was much nearer to 
Mill than to Carlyle, and whose opinion therefore has 
exceptional weight, — the statement of Leslie Stephen. 
In his English Utilitarians he says: "It must be 
allowed, I think, that such men as Carlyle and 
Emerson, for example, vague and even contradictory 
as was their teaching, did more to rouse lofty aspira- 
tion and to moralize political creeds, though less for 
the advancement of sound methods of inquiry, than 
the teaching of the Utilitariansw" ^ 

1 Caird was addressing the Dialectic Society of the University of Glas- 
gow. 

2 The Genius of Carlyle , in Essays on Literature and Philosophy, I, 233-4. 
The biographer of Caird says that "throughout his career as Master he 
deHvered impressive lay-sermons on social problems in the College Hall, 
and occasionally at ToynbeeHall." (D. N. B.) Since he was all his life 
an admirer of Carlyle, may we not believe that even as Master the old 
influence was at work? 

3 English Utilitarians^ III, 477. Stephen acknowledged the influence of 
Carlyle upon himself. In letters to C. E. Norton he said: "Certainly 
there is no one now (1880) who is to the rising generation what Mill and 
Carlyle were to us. . . . Nobody, I think, could ever put so much 
character in every sentence. ... It seems to me as if he had fuel enough 
to keep a dozen steam-engines going. ... He fascinates me hke nobody 
else. " (Maitland's Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, 341, 377-8.) Steph- 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 307 

Who, the reader may ask, were the men touched as 
Stephen has described in this extraordinary tribute? 
They were mainly the young intellectuals, as we have 
seen, beginners in the voyage of life, who, as Froude 
has told us in his great biography, were drifting 
without chart or compass and whom Carlyle brought 
to land. "To the young, the generous, to every one 
who took life seriously, who wished to make an honor- 
able use of it," says Froude, "his words were like the 
morning reveille. . . . Amidst the controversies, 
the arguments, the doubts, the crowding uncertain- 
ties of forty years ago, Carlyle's voice was to the 
young generation of Englishmen like the sound of 
*ten thousand trumpets' in their ears." And he adds 

en's brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, although a follower of Mill, was 
strongly drawn to Carlyle. He found the later Mill "sentimental," and he 
turned sympathetically to Carlyle, whose writings in their " contempt for 
haphazard, hand-to-mouth modes of legislation, the love of vigorous ad- 
ministration on broad, intelligible principles, entirely expressed his own 
feeling." {Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, by Leslie Stephen, 315.) 

Among many other statements as to the social influence of Carlyle, the 
following may be cited: "It was not his mission to legislate, but to inspire ' 
legislators. Every man who since his time has tried to lift politics above 
party has owed something directly or indirectly to his influence, and the 
best have owed the most." (Richard Garnett, Life of Carlyle, 72.) "One 
of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that for more than forty years he 
has clearly seen, and kept constantly and conspicuously in his own sight 
and that of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the midst of 
which we are living. The moral and social dissolution in progress about 
us, and the enormous peril of sailing blindfold and haphazard, without 
rudder or compass or chart, have always been fully visible to him, and it 
is no fault of his if they have not become equally plain to his contempo- 
raries." (Morley, Miscellanies, 137.) "His great and real work was the 
attack on Utilitarianism. ... It is his real glory that he was the first to 
see clearly and say plainly the great truth of our time; that the wealth of 
the state is not the prosperity of the people. ... In this matter he is to 
be noted in connection with national developments much later; for he 
thus became the first prophet of the Socialists." (Chesterton, Victorian 
Age in Literature, 55.) 



3o8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

that in the practical objects at which Carlyle was 
aiming Carlyle was more radical than the radicals ! ^ 
If we inquire who belonged to this company of elect 
spirits, we can readily recall the names of many, each 
long since placed in his niche of fame. There was 
Emerson, who made his pilgrimage to Scotland in 
1833 to talk with the solitary thinker whose Essays 
had already helped to quicken his own awakening 
thought. There was John Stuart Mill, a man utterly 
different from Carlyle, but a man whose hard-won 
victory over the cramped utilitarianism in which he 
had been reared owed encouragement from the mystic 
radical of Craigenputtock. In his Autobiography he 
generously acknowledged "Carlyle's earlier writings 
as one of the channels through which I received the 
influences which enlarged my early narrow creed. 
. . . The wonderful power with which he put (his 
truths) forth made a deep impression upon me, and I 
was during a long period one of his most fervent 
admirers; but the good his writings did me, was not 
as a philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to ani- 
mate." 2 There were Charles Buller and John Sterl- 
ing, early removed by death from a stage on which 
they were destined to play brilliant parts; each of 
whom, along with many others, came under a fascina- 
tion best expressed by Sterling a few weeks before his 
end in a letter to Carlyle: "Towards me it is still more 
true than towards England that no man has been and 
done like you." ^ There were Maurice and Kingsley 

1 Life of Carlyle, III, 248-251. 

2 Autobiography, 174, 175. Cf. Letters of Mill, I, 28. 

' Carlyle's Life of Sterling, 229. Sterling's full-length appreciation of 
Carlyle was his essay in the London and Westminster Review for 1839. In 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 309 

and Dickens, all of whom at one time or another felt 
the energizing power of the Chelsea Prometheus.^ 
And there were Froude and Ruskin, foremost among 

his letters to Emerson there are a number of enthusiastic references to 
Carlyle: Correspondence of Emerson and Sterlings 17, 26, 34, also, E. W. 
Emerson's introductory note. Charles BuUer (1806-1848) was one of the 
most brilliant members of the radical group of his day, including Roe- 
buck, Mill, Grote, Molesworth, and Macaulay. Carlyle tutored him in his 
youth during months from August, 1822, to the summer of 1824. "When 
we hear," says Richard Garnett, "that Charles Buller's principal fault 
was then {i. ^ ., in student days) considered to be indolence, and remember 
that he lived to frame in conjunction with Edward Gibbon Wakefield the 
Durham Report, the charter of Colonial self-government, and died 
President of the Poor Law Board, with his foot on the threshold of the 
Cabinet, we may conclude that Carlyle's influence was precisely what he 
required," {Life of Carlyle, 35.) Carlyle's parting memorial to Buller in 
the Examiner for December, 1848, is full of the love of an older for a 
younger friend. "In the coming storms of trouble one radiant element 
will be wanting now. ... He was not the man to grapple, in its dark 
and deadly dens, with the Lernaean coil of Social Hydras; perhaps not 
under any circumstances: but he did, unassisted, what he could; faith- 
fully himself did something, nay something truly considerable." 

^The Christian Socialists, Maurice and Kingsley, were as unlike 
Carlyle in certain directions as Mill was in others, and yet they too were 
strongly influenced. " Maurice says he has been more edified by Carlyle's 
Lectures than by anything he has heard for a long while, and that he has 
the greatest reverence for Carlyle, but that it is not reciprocal, for he is 
sure Carlyle thinks him a 'sham.'" [From a letter of Strachey (1838), 
quoted in Life of Maurice by his son, I, 250.] In a notable letter (1862) 
written to J. M. Ludlow, after Maurice had had a long conversation 
(with many differences) with Carlyle, Maurice refers to Carlyle as " a man 
who has taught me so much. " {Ibid., II, 404). Kingsley was far nearer to 
Carlyle than was Maurice, both in temper and thought, and owed far 
more to Carljde's stimulating force. He read the Essays and the French 
Revolution while an undergraduate at Cambridge and was "utterly 
delighted." His biographers testify to the "remarkable eff'ect" (the 
words are Mrs. Kingsley's) on his mind of the writings of Carlyle. Alton 
Locke, probably Kingsley's most eflTective work for social reform, was 
refused by the first publisher to whom it was off^ered and it was then 
accepted by Chapman through the friendly oflSces of Carlyle, who was 
"right glad myself to hear of a new explosion, a salvo of red-hot shot 
against the devil's dung-heap from that particular battery." {Charles 
Kingsley, Letters and Memorials of his Life, 128.) Readers of Alton Locke 
do not need to be reminded how much of Carlyle it contains. Dickens 



3IO CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

disciples, of whom further account here would be 
superfluous. The roll could easily be extended, as all 
students of Carlyle know, but we may well break it 
off with a brief reference to two other names. One is 
the name of W. E. Forster, Bradford manufacturer, 
social reformer, Gladstonian statesman, and author 
of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 already 
several times referred to. Forster knew Carlyle 
intimately and acknowledged his influence freely. 
"If Carlyle's companionship," he said in 1847, "has 
had any mental effect upon me, it has been to give me 
a greater desire and possibly an increased power to 
discern the real ^meanings of things,' to go straight to 
the truth wherever its hiding-place, and sometimes 
his words, not so much by their purport as by their 
tone and spirit, sounded through me like the blast of 
a trumpet, stirring all my powers to the battle of life." 
"Carlyle's writings," says Forster's biographer, 
"exercised their fascinating influence over his mind, 
and every day of his life during his first decade at 
Bradford {{. e., 1 842-1 852) seemed to be marked by a 
new stage in the growth of his active interest in the 
social politics of the time." ^ The other name, 

was a fervent admirer of the Chelsea sage. To him he dedicated Hard 
Times (1854), and owed much to him for the inspiration of one of his best 
Christmas stories, The Chimes (1844). "I would go at all times," said 
Dickens, "farther to see Carlyle than any man alive." The French 
Revolution he read, as he says in his extravagant way, "for the 500th 
time," and of course drew from it no little of the inspiration that helped to 
create J Tale of Two Cities (1859). 

1 Life of Forster, by T. Wemyss Reid, 1 19, 81. It was Carlyle's mention 
of Thomas Cooper, a famous Chartist, that brought Forster into touch 
with Cooper. Forster was very active in Chartist meetings and disturb- 
ances, especially at Bradford, and was deeply and influentially inter- 
ested all his life in social conditions. 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 311 

presently to be mentioned more prominently in con- 
nection with Ruskin, is that of William Morris, who 
as a young man heard and believed the gospel of work 
as preached in the early writings of Carlyle. Morris 
read Carlyle at Oxford, and according to his biog- 
rapher, Mackail, Carlyle shared with Ruskin the 
strongest influence that Morris received from prose 
authors, an influence that held him to the end.^ In 
the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine^ published in 
1856 by undergraduates mainly under the leadership 
of Morris, there were five articles of review and 
praise of Carlyle,^ to whom (the writer says) "we 
owe that growing seriousness of tone, which has now 
won a place even in novels, and from kindred minds 
(for example Kingsley's) receives an expression only 
less ardent than his own. ... To me they (z. ^., 
Carlyle's thoughts and counsels) appear practical in 
the highest sense; planted in the very loftiest concep- 
tion of human duty and destiny, and in a clear dis- 
cernment of the divine Laws written in the main 
facts of every Social matter that he examines. . . . 
So practical are they, that I often wish that Carlyle 
had not been one of England's Writers, but one of 
England's Governors ! " ^ Youthful enthusiasm could 
scarcely go further. It was well, no doubt, that the 
enthusiasm was youthful and would sober down with 

"^Lije of Morris i I, 219; cj. also, II, 28, j6. In 1885 when Morris sent 
his Ust of the "Best Hundred Books" to the Pall Mall Gazette (the Ust 
contained but fifty-four titles), he included "Carlyle's Works" in a place 
with Sir Thomas More and Ruskin . {Collected Works of Morris, XXII, 
intro. XVI.) 

2 Although probably not written by Morris they could hardly have 
appeared without his approval. 

3 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (bound volume), 669, 770. 



312 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

age. But where shall we look for better evidence of 
the fire that Carlyle kindled in the hearts of young 
England from 1835 to i860? 

It was from i860 onward that Ruskin's influence 
began to count most for social and economic reform. 
By this time the voice of Carlyle had become, as 
Arnold declared, "sorely strained, over-used, and 
misused," and his direct effect as a personal force had 
begun to wane. Ruskin's personality, although 
distinguished in an eminent degree, never captured 
his contemporaries as did the personality of Carlyle. 
But his thought, apart from its stimulating moral 
quality, has been more fruitful than Carlyle' s, be- 
cause it has carried with it a richer and more definite 
social program, a program already fulfilled in various 
ways. His writings, particularly Unto This Last and 
Time and Tide came upon many minds like a new 
gospel and awakened within them lasting impulses for 
direct social action. Illustrations of this effect have 
already been offered in previous chapters, including 
reference to such workers as Frederic Harrison, F. J. 
Furnivall, Arnold Toynbee, and Miss Octavia Hill.^ 

1 Harrison, Ruskin's biograpber in the English Men of Letters series, has 
recorded numerous testimonies of his debt to Ruskin: e. g., "Ruskin*s 
essays Unto This Last which I read as they appeared in numbers in the 
Cornhill Magazine in i860, filled me as with a sense of a new gospel on this 
earth, and with a keen desire to be in personal touch with the daring 
spirit who had defied the Rabbis of the current economics." {Autobio- 
graphical Memoirs, I, 230.) Furnivall, when a young man, met Ruskin 
(in 1849). "Thus began," he says, "a friendship which was for many 
years the chief joy of my Hfe." {D. N. B.) It was Furnivall who brought 
Ruskin into touch with Maurice, and thus into active relations with the 
Working Men's College. Arnold Toynbee, whose connection with the 
Hinksey Diggers has already been described, lectured to popular audi- 
ences on economic questions (the lectures are now gathered into the nota- 
ble volume. Industrial Revolution), and lived for a time in quarters in Lon- 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 313 

"Probably none of his experiments/' says Ruskin's 
principal biographer and editor, Sir E. T. Cook, "will 
have had so permanent and so fruitful an influence 
towards the solution of modern problems as the 
demonstration which he enabled Miss Octavia Hill 
to give in model landlordism. Ruskin was fond of 
preaching what has been called the 'slum crusade* in 
his lectures at Oxford, and the movement for Uni- 
versity and College 'Settlements' owes not a little to 
his exhortations." Cook's evidence of the power of 
Unto This Last is no less pertinent. Although this 
book sold slowly at first (the edition of 1862 was not 
exhausted in ten years), its circulation greatly in- 
creased when the publication of it was transferred in 
1873 ^o ^^- George Allen. "A few years later," says 
Cook," Ruskin re-issued the book on his own account, 
and the rate of sale during the following thirty years 
was 2000 per annum. Ruskin was told of a working 
man who, being too poor to buy the book, had copied 
it out word for word. Subsequently a selection of 
extracts, sold at a penny, was circulated widely 
among the working classes, and the book has been 
translated into French, German, and Italian. . . . 
When the Parliament of 1906 was elected, there was 
a great hubbub about the large contingent of Labor 
Members, and an ingenious journalist sent circulars 
to them asking them to state. What were the Books 
that had Influenced them ? Some said one, and some 
another; but the book which appeared in the greatest 

don East End, working for the poor and seeking to understand their 
life. Toynbee Hall, in East London, the pioneer institution in Settlement 
work, was named after him, as a tribute to his educational and social 
work among the poor. 



314 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

number of lists was Ruskin's Unto This Lastr"^ 
Additional proof of Ruskin's effect upon the working 
class is furnished by William Morris in his lecture on 
Art and Socialism (1884): "Apart from any trivial 
words of my own, I have been surprised to find such a 
hearty feeling toward John Ruskin among working- 
class audiences: they can see the prophet in him 
rather than the fantastic rhetorician, as more super- 
fine audiences do. That is a good omen, I think, for 
the education of times to come." It was a good omen 
indeed, and the ferment has been working since then, 
through various Ruskin Societies (organized "to 
encourage and promote the study and circulation of 
Mr. Ruskin's writings"), and through the Ruskin 
College, at Oxford, a notable institution for teaching 
working men, and established as a direct result of 
Ruskin's influence.^ 

Ruskin's teaching has told no less steadily and 
effectively upon economic doctrine, according to the 
reports of accredited English witnesses. Mr. J. A. 

1 Works, XVII, intro., CXI; Cook, Life of Ruskin, II, 13-14. . 

2 See Hobson's appendix on Ruskin Societies and the Work, in John 
Ruskin, Social Reformer, 326-328; also an article in the Fortnightly Review 
(1900, V. 6y, p. 325) on The Ruskin Hall Movement. In the Survey for 
August 30, 1919, is the report of a speech in New York, by Miss Margaret 
Bondfield, "oflEicial representative of the British Trade Union Congress," 
on how British labor began to educate itself. Among other things she 
says: "Ruskin College in Oxford, though it is pretty stodgy, and though 
the students there, while they are in Oxford, are not 0/ Oxford, has played 
its part in labor education. Trade unions send up students who are 
expected to come back and give the union the advantage of their knowl- 
edge. Frank Hodges made a brilhant success there, and then went back 
to digging coal. Young as he was, he soon was put in as general secretary 
of the great Miners' Federation, and his brilliance, together with the 
power of Robert Smillie, the president, have lately enabled the federation 
to make history." 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 315 

Hobson, perhaps the foremost of these and himself a 
Ruskinian in many ways, counts as the most dis- 
tinguished services of Ruskin his insistence upon a 
standard of human well-being as a substitute for the 
monetary standard of wealth. "This assertion of 
vital value as the standard and criterion," says Mr. 
Hobson, "is, of course, no novelty. It has underlain 
all the more comprehensive criticisms of orthodox 
political economy by moralists and social reformers. 
By far the most brilliant and effective of these 
criticisms, that of John Ruskin, was expressly formu- 
lated in terms of vital value. . . . This vital crite- 
rion he brought to bear with great skill, alike upon the 
processes of production and consumption, disclosing 
the immense discrepancies between monetary costs 
and human costs, monetary wealth and vital wealth. 
No one ever had a more vivid and comprehensive 
view of the essentially organic nature of the harmony 
of various productive activities needed for a whole- 
some life, and of the related harmony of uses and 
satisfactions on the consumptive side. His mind 
seized with incomparable force of vision the cardinal 
truth of human economics, viz., that every piece of 
concrete wealth must be valued in terms of the vital 
costs of its production and the vital uses of its con- 
sumption, and his most effective assault upon current 
economic theory was based upon its complete inade- 
quacy to afford such information." ^ Mr. Ernest 
Barker, still more recently (191 5), has recorded his 
opinion to much the same effect. Ruskin's teaching, 

1 Work and Wealth (1914), 9. Cf. John Ruskin, Social Reformer, 89, 309, 
and preface. 



3i6 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

he says, "has influenced the doctrine of pure econom- 
ics. It has helped to turn economists since the days 
of Jevons from the theory of production to the theory 
of consumption; it has helped to correct the old 
emphasis laid on saving, and to give more weight to 
spending; it has helped vitally to modify the old 
conception of value as mainly determined by cost of 
production, and to give more scope to the influence of 
utility in the creation of value. Nor has Ruskin's 
teaching only influenced economic science; it has also 
affected the theory and the practice of politics. . . . 
And the vogue of his writings enabled him, perhaps 
more than any other writer, to help men to shed the 
old distrust of the State, and to welcome, as men 
since 1 870 have more and more welcomed, the activ- 
ity of society on behalf of its members. If Ruskin 
was not the begetter of English Socialism, he was a 
foster-father to many English Socialists." ^ 

First among these was William Morris, master of 
modern craftsmen. "The whole of the Socialism with 



^Political Thought from Spencer to To-Day , 195-6. Cf. Chesterton: 
"He was not so great a man as Carlyle, but he was a much more clear- 
headed man. ... On this side of his soul {i. e.., social side) Ruskin 
became the second founder of Socialism." [Victorian Literature, 67-8. 
Cf. also opinion of Geddes (in John Ruskin, Economist, 42); Ingram (in 
History of Political Economy, 1915 ed.); and Stimson (in Quarterly 
Journal of Economics, II, 445.] According to Mr. Bernard Shaw, Ruskin 
did not influence the Fabians: "It is a curious fact that of the three great 
propagandist amateurs of political economy, Henry George, Marx, and 
Ruskin, Ruskin alone seems to have had no effect on the Fabians. Here 
and there in the Socialist movement workmen turned up who had read 
Fors Clavigera or Unto This Last; and some of the more well-to-do no 
doubt have read the first chapter oi Munera Pulveris. But Ruskin's name 
was hardly mentioned in the Fabian Society. My explanation is that, 
barring OHvier, the Fabians were inveterate Philistines." {History of the 
Fahian Society, by Pease, 263.) 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 317 

which Morris identified himself so prominently in the 
eighties/* says Mackail, "had been implicitly con- 
tained and the greater part of it explicitly stated, in 
the pages of Unto This Last in 1862, when Morris had 
just begun the work of his life as a manufacturer. . . 
All his serious references to Ruskin showed that he re- 
tained towards him the attitude of a scholar to a great 
teacher and master, not only in matters of art, but 
throughout the whole sphere of human life."^ Ref- 
erence has already been made, in a previous chapter, 
to the powerful effect which The Nature of Gothic had 
upon Morris, in the Oxford days. In his introduction 
to the Kelmscott Edition (1892) of this famous mani- 
festo — "one of the very few inevitable utterances of 
the century,*' he called it — he recorded his opinion 
that the social teaching of Ruskin was more signifi- 
cant than his entire criticism of art itself. "Some 
readers will perhaps wonder," he wrote, "that in this 
important chapter of Ruskin I have found it neces- 
sary to consider ethical and political, rather than what 
would ordinarily be thought the artistic side of it. I 
must answer that, delightful as is that portion of 
Ruskin*s work which describes, analyzes, and criti- 
cises art, old and new, yet this is not after all the most 
characteristic side of his writings. Indeed, from the 
time at which he wrote this chapter here reprinted, 
those ethical and political considerations have never 
been absent from his criticism of art; and, in my 
opinion, it is just this part of his work, fairly begun in 
The Nature of Gothic^ and brought to its culmination 
in that great book Unto This Last, which has had the 

'^ Life of Morris, II, 201, I, 220. 



3i8 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

most enduring and beneficent eflfect on his contem- 
poraries, and will have through them on succeeding 
generations."^ Readers of Morris who are also 
readers of Ruskin will hear reverberations of the 
master's thought in almost every lecture and essay- 
that Morris produced on the subject of art or social- 
ism, often accompanied with generous acknowledg- 
ments; for Morris took no pains to conceal a main 
source of his inspiration. His whole attack upon 
modern life corresponds exactly with Ruskin's. He 
assailed the ugliness of it, the loss of instinct for 
beauty among people to-day, the "bestial" econom- 
ics, the degradation of the worker by machine 
labor; and he followed up his attack with a stern 
prophecy that a day of change must come when man- 
kind would become an association of workers, each 
realizing the freedom of his soul in joyful labor; and 
with an equally stern demand for a return to sim- 
plicity in life as a preparation for the new order. Like 
Ruskin, too, Morris discovered in medievalism, in the 
old guilds and in Gothic architecture, a clue to the 
way out of the labyrinth in which contemporary 
society had become lost. Extending the notion of art 
as Ruskin had extended it, he valiantly preached the 
gospel of the democracy of art, upon a threefold text, 
namely, that work must be worth doing, that it 
should be of itself pleasant to do, and that it should be 
done under such conditions as would make it neither 
over-wearisome nor over-anxious. 

This message, either as Morris delivered and prac- 
ticed it or as it came directly from Ruskin, has made 

1 Works, X, 461-2. 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 319 

notable impressions in two quarters, neither of which 
can be quite passed by in a general summary such as 
the present one, — the Arts and Crafts Movement 
and present day Guild Socialism. The Arts and 
Crafts Movement, as it came to be named by Mr. 
Cobden-Sanderson, grew out of the work of the Arts 
and Crafts Exhibition Society, which held its first 
exhibition of decorative art in London in 1888. The 
Society was created by a group of young artists drawn 
together under the inspiration of Morris for the pur- 
pose of bringing about (to quote Mackail) "a Renais- 
sance of the decorative arts which should act at once 
through and towards more humanized conditions of 
life both for the workman and for those for whom he 
worked. . . . The way here, as in so many other 
instances, had been pointed out by the far-ranging 
genius of Ruskin long before any steps were, or could 
be, taken towards its realization." ^ Thus if Morris 
and his followers begot the movement, it was Ruskin, 
as Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has aptly said, who "begot 
the begetters.** ^ The movement, however, was not 
only for the purpose of renewing interest in the deco- 
rative arts; it was also an endeavor to see what could 
be done towards the reconstruction of industry by 
the creation of small associated workshops, wherein 
designer and artificer should be one person and not 
two (or more), and wherein common traditions of 
craft might be established and machines rather than 
men should be made the slaves. The most conspic- 

1 Life of Morris, II, 196, 201. 

^ Arts and Crafts Movement (1905), 12. The statement of the purposes 
of the movement by Mr. Walter Crane, in his introduction to Arts and 
Crafts Essays (1893), is shot through with Ruskinism. 



320 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

uous expression of this aim has probably been the 
Guild of Handicraft, established in East London in 
1888, by Mr. C. R. Ashbee, an enthusiastic disciple of 
Ruskin and Morris.^ "The Guild had its begin- 
nings/* says Mr. Ashbee, "in the years 1886-7 in a 
small Ruskin class, conducted at Toynbee Hall." ^ 
Its aims and its achievements alike, according to its 
founder, have all along been due to the inspiration of 
Ruskin and Morris. And it has constituted a most 
challenging experiment, for it has sought to realize in 
small shops under co-operative control all the Yirtues 
of the medieval guild system, including quality-pro- 
duction before quantity-production, fellowship and 
happiness in work, permanence of status, concentra- 
tion of force without the deadening subdivision of 
labor, and the education of the consumer. 

These purposes (or most of them),^ united with a 
demand for the overthrow of capitalism and the 
wage-system, find a more significant expression to- 
day in the program of a remarkable movement in 
England known as Guild Socialism. Originating in 
1906 with the publication of an article in the Con- 
temporary Review by Mr. A. R. Orage and a book on 
the Restoration of the Gild System by Mr. A. J. Penty, 
the movement has drawn to itself a number of 

^ In 1902 the Guild was moved to the country, at Campton, Gloucester- 
shire. In 1907, after practically twenty years of substantial life, it was in 
financial straits. I regret to say that I have been unable to follow its 
history since the time of Mr. Ashbee's record in Craftsmanship in Indus^ 
tryy 1908. 

2 An Endeavor Towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Mor- 
ris, (1901), I. 

' Guild Socialism does not advocate as a national policy small-scale 
production in local workshops. 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 321 

brilliant thinkers and writers, who are not only- 
waging war upon competitive industry, but who are 
also fighting a battle for ideals of labor which go back 
to Morris, and from him to Ruskin.^ Mr. Penty, who 
has been called " the prophet of the Guild idea," ^ and 
whose approach to labor problems appears to be 
decidedly in the spirit of art and medieval crafts- 
manship, is an avowed follower of Ruskin and Morris. 
Our only hope, he says, in solving the social questions 
of to-day "lies in some such direction as that fore- 
shadowed by Ruskin"; whose guild idea he therefore 
takes up, reduces to practical outlines, and makes a 
basis for a re-creation of the present industrial order. ^ 
Cole and Hobson are following a different path, but 
their eyes are set upon the same goal,^ for their ideal- 

1 For a full account of the movement the reader is referred to the books 
on Guild Socialism, the most notable of which thus far published are: 
National Guilds (1914), by S. G. Hobson; Old Worlds for New (1917), by 
Penty; Self-Government in Industry (1918), by Cole; Guild Principles in 
War and Peace (1918), by S. G. Hobson; The Meaning of National Guilds 
(1919), by Reckitt and Bechhofer. In a word the school stands for the 
ownership of industry by the state, but for its management by the work- 
ers, who are to be organized locally, sectionally, and nationally, accord- 
ing to industries (organization by craft will cross-section organization by 
industry), into democratic units known as guilds. "The title oi Guild has 
implicit in it several unique industrial attributes: it means that public 
recognition is accorded to the body, that the monopoly of its particular 
trade is vested in it, that all its members have an equal and free status as 
associates in it; also, that the Guild spirit in work is revived." (Reckitt 
and Bechhofer, 304.) 

2 Ibid., 396. 

' See his preface to Restoration of the Gild System. Penty also fully 
recognizes the pioneer work of Morris and the men of the Arts and 
Crafts Movement. Cf. Old Worlds for New, Ch. XH; also Reckitt and 
Bechhofer: among the influences upon Guild Sociahsm "we should find 
the craftsman's challenge and the blazing democracy of William Morris." 
(Intro., Xni.) 

* Penty has now joined them in favoring national guilds as a step 
towards local guilds. (Reckitt and Bechhofer, 397.) 



322 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

ism again is the unassailable idealism of Ruskin and 
Morris. "I share to the full," says Cole, "William 
Morris's happy conviction that joy in life, and art as 
the expression of that joy, are fundamental, and, if 
you will, natural, to free men and women. I believe 
that, if men and women were set free, as they might 
be, from economic necessity, they would set with new 
manhood about the creation of the good life.** ^ Thus 
the fire that Ruskin lighted in his Nature of Gothic^ 
the fire that inflamed the heart of Morris, burns still, 
and will burn, until the evils of our industrial civili- 
zation are utterly and everlastingly consumed. 

It is a good many years now since Carlyle and Rus- 
kin first went forth to combat these evils. As we look 
out upon the world to-day, a world still bent under 
the wounds and burdens of a frightful war, can we say 
with any truth that the standard under which they 
fought has gone forward? If industry was large in 
their time, it has expanded to dimensions almost 
beyond computation now. Material progress has 
advanced with ever accelerating speed, until whole 
continents seem to be Hke nothing so much as vast 

1 Labor in the Commonwealth, 220; cf. also on the work of Morris, Self- 
Government in Industry, 119-121, 280, 302. As to the ideahsm of the 
Guild Socialists note the following two or three statements out of scores: 
"The case for Guild Socialism is based upon an unchanging faith that 
man's motives and hopes, freed from the contamination of poverty, will 
replenish the world with unsuspected richness and variety of wealth and 
life" {National Guilds, 211); "Let us look at industry, not as a science 
apart, but as a vital function of communal life" {Labor in the Common- 
wealth, 33); "Not art for the rich or the poor, not art for art's sake; but 
the spirit of the true and the beautiful entering into our industrial life; 
production no longer a grinding burden but a pleasure, limited only by 
Nature and our necessities." {Guild Principles, 170.) 



HERALDS OF THE BETTER ORDER 323 

networks of manufacturing systems, woven together 
to minister to the newly-created necessities or luxu- 
ries of congested populations. The genius and energy 
of man, supported by the factory system and by 
machine labor, those giant offspring of the industrial 
revolution, are rapidly mastering the resources of the 
earth. The smoke and din of the world's workshops 
are omnipresent, and the morning or evening march 
of its toilers is heard in every ear. 

Out of the darkness and confusion of these times in 
which we are living, are there no lights to point the 
way, no voices lifted for social justice and human 
fellowship? There are, many of them, as wise ob- 
servers know. On every hand, from the council 
rooms of capital, from the debating halls of labor, 
from the press, from the pulpit, from club, and 
school, and home, everywhere, even from the as- 
semblies of statesmen met to restore the nations to 
peace, there comes the word that the present order 
must give way to a better one. And although differ- 
ent leaders or groups place the emphasis differently, 
the full meaning of this message is fourfold: — the 
conservation, at all costs, of the human factor in 
industry; increased collective control, or ownership, 
in the interest of a vast body of dependent consumers; 
increased partnership of labor with capital, in man- 
agement and profits of industry, tending always 
towards fuller democratic control by labor, as labor 
proves its capacity; and, finally (last to come but of 
most value when it arrives), the opportunity for 
expression in work of the creative impulse, a consum- 
mation which will set the worker free and will realize 



324 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 

for him the highest gifts of life, — joy and fellowship 
in daily toil, — and will realize for society a genuine 
revival of art. The number of those who are now 
thinking of this program and striving for the fulfil- 
ment of it is legion. Fifty and more years ago the 
number was few, and they were prophets. None 
among that small company spoke out more powerfully 
or wisely than Carlyle and Ruskin. For with all their 
shortness of vision in some directions, they saw far 
more clearly than the majority of their contempor- 
aries, and they set forth in language of incomparable 
power, what was coming and what must come. They 
were, in truth, heralds of the better order. 



APPENDIX 

Since the foregoing chapters were written and 
sent to press there have come into the writer's hands 
three small commemorative volumes of addresses, 
letters, and studies in connection with the centenary 
of Ruskin*s birth; observed by a public meeting 
February 8, 1919, at the Royal Society of Arts, 
London, and by an exhibition of his drawings at the 
Royal Academy in the autumn of the same year. 
The volumes are: Ruskin Centenary Addresses^ edited 
by J. H. Whitehouse, Oxford University Press, 19 19; 
Ruskin Centenary Letters ^ edited by J. H. Whitehouse, 
Oxford University Press, 191 9; Ruskin The Prophet 
and Other Centenary Studies^ edited by J. H. White- 
house, E. P. Button and Co., 1920. Among many 
striking tributes in these volumes to Ruskin as a 
social force, the following may be quoted as per- 
haps the most notable: 

(i) "A great deal of his inspiration came from Carlyle, 
but it was changed in the process, passing through a mind 
so different as Ruskin's was, and it made a more direct, 
sympathetic, and emotional appeal to many people than 
the same fundamental principles had made when they 
were stated with the fiercely vigorous abruptness of Car- 
lyle himself. Perhaps it is in that direction that he has 
most told upon what I may call the younger half of the 
generation to which he belonged. The older half of the 
generation to which most of us here belong was impressed 
chiefly by his writings upon Art and upon Nature, but 
those who are still below sixty years of age have probably 

32s 



326 APPENDIX 

been more affected by his ethical teachings. In this 
respect he did make a great difference to his time, and 
has been the parent of many movements, many new 
currents of opinion, which have been playing backwards 
and forwards over the face of the country during the last 
twenty-five or thirty years." (Lord Bryce, Addresses, p. 5.) 

(2) "It is as an interpreter, not of art but of life, that 
he now stands. Here his influence has been, and con- 
tinues to be, immense. It is perhaps greater, so far at 
least as England is concerned, than that of any other 
single thinker or teacher. His social doctrine was germi- 
nal : it colors the whole movement of modern thought, and 
shapes the whole fabric of modern practice. . , . Our 
whole social legislation, and the whole attitude of mind of 
which legislation is the result, have since followed, halt- 
ingly and fragmentarily, the principles then asserted for 
the first time. Nor have sixty years lessened their vital 
and germinal force. Much of what was then taken for 
monstrous paradox has become accepted truth, the mere 
commonplace of social organization. Much more still 
awaits fulfilment, and remains to us what it was for him, 
an obscure and terrible inspiration, a sound of trumpets 
in the night. . . . He is the prophet of the Socialist 
movement; he taught its leaders and inspired their 
followers. But the doctrines of Socialism, whether in 
its bureaucratic or its anarchic form, were to him false and 
even deadly." (J. W. Mackail, Addresses, pp. 11, 14, 21.) 

(3) "Ruskin's life plan includes all that is vital, all 
that is real, in work and life to-day. His influence has 
permeated the whole world of artistic creativeness. But 
what was perhaps more significant still to me was the 
discovery that Ruskin perceived in the industrial world 
of his day the premonitory tremors of the vast upheaval 
which now threatens the whole world, the whole of 
civilization, the whole of our life, our ideals, our religion, 
and everything else. The organization in the midst of 
which we have been living, to which we have got accus- 
tomed, is being shaken to its very foundations, and who 



APPENDIX 327 

knows that it may not fall in ruins about us. Yet one 
cannot feel, or think, or believe that it is going to fall in 
ruins, because after all, although Ruskin foresaw and 
foreshadowed and wrote clearly about the very thing that 
has fallen upon us, he did at the same time indicate the 
cure for the industrial evil. And that remedy which is in 
our own hands is, briefly, to return again to a creative 
life, to individual, collective, and co-operative productiv- 
ity. We must, as Carlyle says, * produce, produce, be it 
but the infinitesimalist product' — we must produce. 
Ruskin never wearied of reminding us that there is no 
way of learning all and quickly about anything but by 
the labor of our hands. Years before Stanley Hall, his 
pupils, and other American writers taught that muscular 
activity influences mental growth, Ruskin was teaching 
the same thing more beautifully, and therefore perhaps 
more truly. Ruskin shows that the man who builds his 
own house, tills his own ground, makes his own furniture, 
has more wealth and more essential culture than he who 
only makes fortunes by the labors of others. Workers 
have learnt by Ruskin's precept and their own practice 
that the basis of craftsmanship is vital morality, vital 
religion. Creative work is philosophy in being. That 
is why the great teachers of the world have all been 
craftsmen. . . . 

"It has occurred to me to suggest that of all the schemes 
of reconstruction which are before the world to-day, 
and before ourselves in particular, the most promising 
are those schemes which, consciously or unconsciously, 
are giving eff*ect to Ruskin's ideal as outlined in the con- 
stitution of St. George's Guild, and seek to plant both able 
and disabled soldiers on the land and to give them oppor- 
tunities of craft activity, to help them to make a happy, 
productive, and real life for themselves, and in so doing to 
give to England again some degree of that beauty of 
creative activity which she possessed in the earlier periods 
of her history. The scheme of the St. George's Guild 
might well now be carried into effect, with the aid and 



328 APPENDIX 

help of all artists and craftsmen of to-day, the help of the 
Art Workers' Guild, the Arts and Crafts Society and 
other handicraft societies, and the Royal Academy. If 
all artists would combine to urge upon all the authorities 
the necessity of establishing at least a few real, recon- 
structed, reconstituted villages, towns, districts, whatever 
limitation you may prefer, if they would urge the recon- 
struction of some few centres, however small at first 
matters not, in which the soldiers who are returning from 
the front, wounded and sound, could settle and live a 
rational, Ruskinian, and therefore natural life, then real 
effect might be given to Ruskin's ideal of a new order of 
production, and his three graces, his three beauties of life, 
his three cardinal virtues, admiration, hope, and love, 
might again flower among the ruins of the world and 
something would have been done to heal the wounds 
which war has made." (Henry Wilson, President of the 
Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Addresses, 28-29; 

32-33-) 

(4) "To-day official recognition is given to the princi- 
ples Ruskin expounded. Codes have been widened, 
and although much progress has yet to be made in con- 
nexion with our whole system of national education, that 
which has taken place is precisely on the lines which Rus- 
kin laid down. He urged, for instance, so far back as 
1857 that drawing should be taught as an integral branch 
of education. He pleaded ♦for the inclusion of music and 
noble literature as essential things in education. He de- 
sired that all schools in themselves should be beautiful. 
He desired to form standards of taste and judgment by 
surrounding children with beautiful things. He fought 
against the idea that education was something to be con- 
fined to class-rooms or in buildings, and he made a noble 
plea for the value of the outdoor life and scenes of natural 
beauty in all schemes of education. All these expressions 
of educational principles have been in part at least realized. 
The bare and ugly school-rooms of the past are replaced 
by buildings furnished in many cases on the lines indicated 



APPENDIX 329 

by Ruskin. Pictures, sculpture, color, architecture, are 
realized to be great instruments of education. Drawing 
was made a compulsory subject in elementary schools 
in 1890. Even the introductions issued by the Board of 
Education to the various editions of their code now give 
expression for the guidance of school managers to the 
Ruskinian views we have set forth. . . . Ruskin's teach- 
ing in this connexion (i. e., handicrafts) has made steady 
headway in our educational life. Most of the develop- 
ments on the lines of his teaching, so far as younger 
children are concerned, have taken place in the secondary 
schools of England and Scotland. . . . No teacher before 
Ruskin had been so successful in the ultimate appeal which 
he made to unlettered people. Some educational thinkers 
had taught some of the things Ruskin taught and before 
he wrote. But they made no popular appeal. Ruskin's 
strength, after all, came from the fact that he appealed to 
the conscience of the entire nation. The widest response 
to his appeal came from the working classes. They have 
always been the greatest readers of his books. His lan- 
guage made to them something of the same popular appeal 
as did the prose of the Bible to an earlier age." (John 
Howard Whitehouse, Addresses, 50-51, 55, 64.) 

(5) "The close connection of the decay of art with 
faulty social arrangements was his great discovery. 
Ugliness in the works of man is a symptom of disease in 
the State. This was Ruskin's conviction, and we may 
call it his discovery. ... As an art-critic he had taught 
that beauty is fundamentally a matter of right values, and 
that all ugliness has its root in a false or mean or vulgar 
standard of values. But conduct also is determined by our 
standard of values, which alone gives life its meaning. If 
our values are perverted, our social order, in which our 
notions of good and evil express themselves, will be 
perverse and bad, and there will be no beauty in what 
we do or in what we make." (Dean Inge, Studies, 25, 26.) 

(6) "If to-day Labor leaders and social reformers in 
general are quite as keenly set upon reducing the hours 



330 APPENDIX 

of labor and otherwise diminishing the pressure of the 
machine upon the man who tends it, we have to thank 
men like Ruskin and Morris for much of this revolt. Not 
even yet have psychologists succeeded in making us 
recognize the amount of vital damage done by setting 
men and women to spend most of their time and energy 
in some single narrow routine — not merely the painful 
fatigue and conscious or unconscious atrophy of other 
productive capacities, but the narrowing of the capacity 
for enjoyment which comes from this over-specialization. 
Not more productivity, but more liberty from industry, 
should be the chief demand of humanist reformers to-day, 
and they should boldly announce the gospel of Ruskin as 
theirs. . . . Time and Tide and Fors are full of suggestions 
keenly prophetic of the new social-economic order which 
is even now pressing through the broken shell of the 
nineteenth-century individualism. Skilled manual labor, 
with the apparent exception of agricultu'"e, he relegates to 
a guild system not very different from the Guild Socialism 
which to-day appears In many quarters to be displacing 
both the traditional Trade Unionism and the State 
Socialism of last century. ... In economic, as In educa- 
tional reform, he was no barren prophet of denunciation, 
but a true leader towards a land of promise. Long before 
scientific pedagogy had worked out the psychology of the 
relations between brain and hand work, Ruskin had 
recognized their fundamental importance and had de- 
manded the union of the workshop and the schoolroom. 
When nature and art, In any real sense, were taboo in our 
schools, he exposed their vital value, not merely or mainly 
as subjects in a curriculum, but as pervasive and suggestive 
Influences in the atmosphere of education. A minimum 
wage based upon the wholesome maintenance of the 
worker and his family, a shorter working day, the housing 
problem, the revival of rural life, and such specific reforms 
as smoke abatement and the prevention of river pollution, 
owe an immense and often unrecognized debt to Ruskin*s 
early advocacy." (J. A. Hobson, Studies^ 92, 94, 96.) 



INDEX 



Abbot Samson, 99, 103 

Allen, George, 262, 268-270, 313 

Alton Locke f 309 

Aristotle, 152 

Arnold, Matthew, 89, 96, 291, 301, 

312 
Arts and Crafts Movement, 319, 

321 
Ashbee, C. R., 320 
Ashley, Lord, 19, 36 
Atkinson, Blanche, 278 
Austin, Johif, 45 

Bagehot, Walter, 33, 297 

Baker, George, 279 

Barker, Ernest, 315 

Bentham, Jeremy, 29, 30, 45, 6$y 

170, 201, 298 
Blanc, Louis, 46 
Bowring, John, 45 
Bright, John, 48, 174 
Brown, Ford Madox, 261 
Browning, Robert, 141 
Buller, Charles, 45, 308, 309 
Bulwer-Lytton, E. G., 21 
Burke, Edmund, 165, 305 
Burne-Jones, Edward, 135, 261 
Burns, Robert, 73, 78 

Caird, Edward, 305, 306 

Carlyle, (Mrs.) Jane Welsh, 129, 

143 
Carlyle, Thomas; the new era, 
41-43; social interest, 43-50; 
new era described, 50-54; the 
poor, 54-57; the rich, 57-58; 
attitude and position, 59-63; 
materialism of new age, 63-67; 
effects, 68-70; rise of democracy 
or revolt of masses, 70-73; inter- 



pretation of democracy: — (fa- 
vorable), 73-78; (unfavorable), 
78-85. (Chapter II.) 

Reform of individual the basis 
of all reform, 86-90; conception 
of morality, 91; religion, 92; 
gospel of work, 93-95; hero- 
- worship, 96-102; new chivalry 
of labor, 103-107; organization 
of labor, 107-110; new human 
relations, 111-112; wages, 112; 
education, 113-114; permanence 
of status, 115-116; co-operation, 
116; government-control, 117- 
123; the new society of the fu- 
ture, 123-124; the gifted, 125- 
127. (Chapter III.) 

Retirement from literary 
work, 128; contrast with Ruskin, 
129-130; relations with Ruskin, 
141-145; influence upon Ruskin, 
146; Hkeness to Ruskin, 146- 
147. (Chapter IV.) 

Social philosophy compared 
with Ruskin's, 291-298; con- 
trasted with Ruskin's, 299-301; 
influence of, 301-312. (Chapter 
VIII.) 

Cash payment, 69, iii 

Cavaignac, Godfroi, 46 

Cazamian, Louis, 22 

Cambridge Inaugural Address, 235 

Cestus of Aglaia, 219 

Chapman, S. J., 5, 13 

Characteristics, 61, in, 120 

Chartism (Carlyle's Essay), 62, 71, 
100, 108, no, 112, 114, 119, 120, 
296, 297, 302 

Charrism, 38, 42, 50, 59, 72, 77 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10, 187 



331 



332 



INDEX 



Chesterton, G. K., 307, 316 

Child-labor, 17 

Christian SociaHsm, 245, 309 

Clough, A. H., 301 

Cobbett, William, 33, 36, 37 

Cobden-Sanderson, T. J., 319 

Cole, G. D. H., 321, 322 

Combination Laws, 23, 35, 36, 39 

Contemporary Review, 169 

Cook, Sir E. C, 134, 140, 277, 279, 

280, 313 
Cornhill Magazine, 139, 312 
Crane, Walter, 3 19 
Cromwell, Oliver, 85, 98 

Dante, 54, 56, 141, 165, 187, 233 

Defoe, Daniel, 6 

Dial, The, 305 

Dickens, Charles, 20, 21, 291, 301, 

309,310 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 20, 21, 249, 

291 
Dixon, Thomas, 139 
Downs, David, 280 

Edgeworth, Maria, 33 

Education Act, 302 

Eliot, George, 291 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 47, 61, 

270, 305, 308 
Enclosures, 16 
Engels, Friedrich, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25 

Fabian Society, 302, 316 

Factory Acts, 35, 39, 302 

Factory System, 15 

Fleming, Albert, 285, 286 

Fors Clavigera, 8, 140, 141, 143, 
150, 152, 17s, 177, 187, 188, 189, 
203, 231, 268, 273, 283, 292, 316 

Forster, W. E., 310 

Fraser's Magazine, 139 

Frederick the Great, 98, 144, 145 

Frederick the Great, History of, 62 

French Revolution, The, 62, 71, 74, 
309* 310 



French Revolution, 75-77, 82, 102, 

144 
Froude, J. A., 63, 99, 139, 145, 

146, 270, 307, 309 
Furnivall, F. J., 261, 312 

Garnett, Richard, 307 
Gaskell, Dr., 5, 8, 13, 19 
Gaskell, Mrs. E. C, 20, 21, 291 
Geddes, Patrick, 316 
George, Henry, 302, 316 
Giotto, 187, 233, 286 
Goethe, J. W., 97, 122 
Grote, George, 29, 309 
Guild of Handicraft, 320 
Guild Socialism, 320-322 
Guy, John, 280 

Harrison, Frederic, 141, 180, 184, 

312 
Heroes and Hero-Worship, 62, 97, 

100, 144 
Hill, Octavia, 266-267, 312, 313 
Hobson, H. G., 321 
Hobson, J. A.,33, 196, 2SS, 3 14, 3 IS 
Hodges, Frank, 314 
Homer, 131, 187, 252 
Hume, Joseph, 39, 46 
Hunt, Holman, 135 

Irving, Edward, 43, 45, 47 

Jeffrey, Francis (Lord), 26, 46 
Jevons, Stanley, 171, 316 
Johnson, Samuel, 73, 99 
Jowett, Benjamin, 305 

Kingsley, Charles, 20, 21, 245, 

291, 308, 309, 311 
Kitchin, G. W., 264 

Laissez-faire, 26, 66, 67, 82, 107, 
138, 170, 293, 294, 302, 305 

Lattef-Day Pamphlets, 60, 62, 71, 
102, 107, 114, 117, 122, 124-125, 
144-145 



INDEX 



333 



Lecky, W. E. H., 99, 296, 305 

Leeds GuardiaUy 140 

Livy, 130 

Lockhart, J. G., 187 

Luther, Martin, 76, 98, 99, 297 

Macadam, J. L., 12 

Macaulay, T. B., Lord, 53, 297, 

309 
MacCunn, John, 304 
Mackail, J. T., 180, 311, 317, 319 
Maine, Sir Henry, 297 
Malthus, T. R., 30, 31, 32, 33, d^y^ 

139, 170 
Manchester Examiner y 140 
Martineau, Harriet, 33 
Maurice, F. D., 245, 261, 308, 309, 

312 
Marx, Karl, 18, 302, 316 
Mazzini, Joseph, 46, 295, 297, 304 
Meredith, George, 55 
Michael Angelo, 157 
Mill, James, 29, 39 
Mill, J. S., 29, 33, 45, 170, 171, 

184, 29s, 296, 297, 303, 304, 306, 

307, 308, 309 
Millais, J. E., 13s 
Milton, John, 165, 290, 305 
Modern Painters^ 133-136, 138, 

139, 150, 152, 179, 189, 258, 

270 
Molesworth, Sir William, 45, 309 
More, Sir Thomas, 311 
Morley, John, Lord, 307 
Morris, William, 11, 135, 180, 288, 

311,314, 316-322 
Munera Pulveris, 139, 142, 146, 

165, 187, 188, 189, 202, 316 
Mystery of Life and Its Arts, 243 

Napoleon, 14, 41, 78, 85, 98 
Newcastle, Duke of, 27 

O'Connell, Daniel, 49 
O'Connor, Feargus, 296 
Orage, A. R., 320 



Owen, Robert, 18, 19, 36, 37, 38, 

47 
Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 

311 

Past and Present^ 62, 71, 101-107, 
III, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 
120, 125, 127, 144, 271, 273, 
304, 305 

Peel, Sir Robert, 35, 125, 297 

Penty, A. J., 320, 321 

Philosophical Radicalism, 29 

Place, Francis, 17, 22, 25, 27, 29, 
32, 33, 36, 37, 38 

Plato, 187, 213, 253 

Political Economy of Art, 231, 234 

Porter, G. R., 13 

Pre-Raphaelites, 135 

PrcBteritay 130, 131 

Progress and Poverty ^ 302 

Queen of the Air, 176 

Rawnsley, Canon, 263 
Reade, Charles, 20, 21, 291 
Reform Bill (1832), 37, 42, 71, 

102 
Reformation, Protestant, 75 
Reminiscences (Carlyle's), 145 
Ricardo, David, 30, 31, 32, 33, 

170, 173, 174 
Rogers, Samuel, 135 
Rose, J. H., 297 
Rossetti, D. G., 135, 140, 261 
Rousseau, J. J., 298 
Ruskin, John; boyhood and early 
education, 131-132; interest in 
Turner, 133-134; art-critic, 135; 
transition to political economy, 
135-139; encouragement of 
Carlyle, 141-142; their personal 
relations, 143-145; likeness to 
Carlyle, 146-148. (Chapter IV.) 
Relation of art to political 
economy, 149-150; analysis of 
beauty, 151-154; relation of art 



334 



INDEX 



to moral life in the individual 
and in the nation, 154-157; 
architecture as an expression of 
national life, 157-161; art and 
environment, 162-163; ugliness 
in modern world, 164-169; 
assault upon political economy, 
170-174; gives up art for social 
reform, 175-178. (Chapter V.) 

Art as clue to social reform, 
179-18 1 ; modern worker a 
machine, 182-184; creative as 
opposed to mechanical industry, 
185-186; writings in political 
economy, 187-189; political 
economy defined, 189-190; 
wealth, 190-191; wages, 192- 
196; human factor in industry 
and the new pohtical economy, 
196-202. (Chapter VI.) 

Purity of birth, 204; educa- 
tion, 205-211; effects of educa- 
tion upon station in hfe, 211- 
212; servile labor, 213-223; 
landed aristocracy, 224; land 
question, 225-228; great mer- 
chants, 228-230; organization 
of industry, 231-232; guilds, 
233-240; function of the State, 
241-244; socialism, 245-246; 
equality, 246-247; distrust of 
popular government, 248-250; 
two classes in society, governors 
and governed, 251-252; form of 
government, 253; individual re- 
form the basis of social reform, 

254-257 

Passion for practice, 258-260; 
working men's college, 260-262; 
Hinksey Diggers, 262-265; street 
cleaning, 265; tea-shop, 266; 
model landlordism, 266-267; 
publishing, 268-270; St. George's 
Guild, 271-288. (Chapter VII.) 

Social philosophy compared 
with Carlyle's, 291-298; con- 



trasted with Carlyle's, 299-301; 

influence of, 312-322. (Chapter 

VIII.) 
Ruskin, John James, 130, 143 
Russell, Lord John, 297 
Rydings, E., 284-285 

Sartor Resartus, 42, 44, 61, 62, 73, 

100, 144, 145, 293, 304 
Scott, Sir Walter, 131, 252 
Senior, Nassau, 34 
Sesame and Lilies , 140 
Seven Lamps of Architecture y 134, 

158, 179 
Severn, Arthur, 266 
Shaw, Bernard, 316 
Shakespeare, William, 131 
Shooting Niagara^ 62, 72, 1 14 
Signs of the Times y 43, 61 
Simon, St., 43-44 
Smillie, Robert, 314 
Smith, Adam, 10, 29, 30, 31, 170, 

174, 201, 298 
Spencer, Herbert, 297 
Spenser, Edmund, 187 
Stephen, James Fitzjames, 297, 

307 _ 

Stephen, Sir Leslie, 30, 243, 306 
Sterling, John, 308 
Stones of Venice y 134, 158, 180 
Survey, The, 314 
Swift, Jonathan, 165 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 141, 291 
Thackeray, W. M., 139, 291 
Thomson, George, 286 
Time and Tide, 139, 187, 189, 203, 

312 
Tolstoi, Lyof, 154 
Toynbee, Arnold, 27, 35, 264, 265, 

312 
Turner, J. M. W., 133, 134, 165 

Unto This Last, 136, 138, 139, 140, 
142, i8«r"i89, 202, 231, 312, 313, 
314,316,317 



INDEX 335 

Virgil, 165 Whistler, J. M., 259 

Voltaire, 97 . Wordsworth, William, 4, 11, 78, 

89, 154, 285 
Walpole, Spencer, 20, 25, 28 Working Men's College, 138, 187, 

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 24, 211, 251, 260-262, 268, 281, 

302 312 



0^ 



^0 '3^\ 



